To be fair, this is exactly the type of thing you’d expect China to be good at, unilateral decision making.

Also, when your country's population is such that the entire IPv4 address space could only allow three addresses per resident, with that ignoring all reserved / multicast restrictions...

Benevolent leader is the best case of government, it is just improbable and of course it is too risky for any dissenter, and the successor is never as good. So people go for inclusive forms of government, which produces average case results more often.