Why is this an advantage? As in, what's the downside to having to port forward?
It really isn't, it's the same declaration in your config, and then your automation makes your devices make it happen.
I assume that Palo Alto have similar APIs.
My routers don't do anything at layer 4, the fortigates advertise default routes via BGP into the core switches, which route everything.
Now of course you need to make sure that your traffic going out of one firewall comes back via the same firewall, that's trivial to handle though, and is required for session based firewalling.
Plesae don't tell me that "ipv6 is better" because you are still logging into network devices and making changes like its 1999?
SLAAC is great, unless you want to be able to be able to register devices ex. so you can add them to DNS, at which point it becomes a liability.
> You can have stable addresses across ISPs if you bring your own prefix or use a tunnel.
I do really like that, yes. Being able to do a VPN and not worry about colliding with other RFC 1918 users is great.
> You don’t get as easily blacklisted for email delivery since you dot. Share a /24 with a bunch of spammers.
Anyone doing blacklisting by IP just blacklists subnets or ASs, so I really doubt that this is better.
You can have zero configuration address discovery in a way that is simpler than IPv4.
You don’t need to worry about what happens when you get to over 200 devices on your local network (not unheard of in at home networks when you start adding IoT devices.
You can have stable addresses across ISPs if you bring your own prefix or use a tunnel.
You save money by not renting IPv4 addresses.
You don’t get as easily blacklisted for email delivery since you dot. Share a /24 with a bunch of spammers.
This is before you get into P2P networking without having to rely on a third party relay.