NAT doesn't fix the issue, it works around it. It means that hosting a home server costs extra money to get a static IP.
> Not being able to route directly doesn’t seem to be a major issue to me.
Look at the bigger world around you.
I am, right now, involved in a major cloud migration. Having overlapping, constrained RFC1918 space and also having to NAT everything is presenting an enormous set of constraints and risks. It adds literally zero benefit.
Life would be infinitely easier, and we could provide so many more capabilities if everything could just have a routable IP address. Unfortunately, I'm not in charge of our addressing policy.
NAT is an awful, short-sighted hack that causes many more problems than it solves.
Not being able to route directly doesn’t seem to be a major issue to me. It for sure require more computing power in routers but also adds some safety and privacy by design.