I'm sure if you start a fund to pay those operators to care, they'll get right on it. The current case is the people who need much more granular space are different than the people who'd bear the cost of it.

Otherwise, just move to IPv6 or something and fix the problem in a saner way.

Practical reasons of replacing "all the routers" aside ... would this even be desirable?

Do we really want IP space carved up into smaller and smaller bites? Do we really want even more and smaller entities advertising routes into BGP? The big players have enough troubles with it - we don't need small businesses with a /28 playing in those waters.

Kind of / maybe. At my last job, we wanted to host our own anycast nameservers. You get the best results from having four nameservers in DNS, and you want them independent, so there's four /24s out there doing not much other than DNS (I think there may be some other stuff now). On the other hand, some other changes meant our thousands of servers no longer had their own ipv4 addresses, so there's several /24s returned to the hosting provider to be used by others.

There's a lot of value in owning your user-facing IPs and being able to move them around as needed, but a lot of services don't really have that many user facing IPs, so utilization is low if they get a /24 per location.

I tend to think the amount of companies who want to do that AND could do it well is vanishingly low.

On the converse - I think of all the smaller businesses I worked around that really wanted to get their own portable IP block and ASN because they thought it made them serious ... but just had no business playing in that space.