In gaming communities e.g. Minecraft you regularly get people asking for port forwarding related questions. Some gamedevs automate that process using UPnP, I believe Eve is one of them.
Neither solution works for me though, as someone whose IPv4 connnectivity is behind a CGNAT.
ALL ISPs in my country have deployed CGNAT so there's no "changing ISP" for me either. IPv6 is the only solution left unless I want to pay a premium to get one of those public IPv4 addresses. Really, single-layered IPv4 NAT can't last forever. The address space of IPv4 is simply too limited.
the push of p2p comms in gaming was never a good idea, but i can totally see how it was sold. apart from that i don't know why any game would need incoming connections.
the upnp cargo cult in gaming is real though, despite the prevalence of cgnat.
i agree that you should have choice but am not yet ready to accept that ~11B ppl cannot manage with ~3B addresses given the typical ratio of users per v4 with nat.
Using "11 billion" as an estimate of total needed addresses is a bad idea (TM).
Both sides of the internet (provider and user) need an IP address. An average human may possibly require two or more addresses simultaneously (phone, laptop, office PC, and maybe IoT) in the future. And internet infrastructures like routers and managed switches, although never visible to the end users, need an IP address for themselves too. And don't get me started on containerization.
Furthermore, there are internal networks running out of RFC1918 addresses to use so even internal IPv4 has a real limit. Comcast is one of them, T-mobile is another. I believe Facebook moved to IPv6-core because of this too.
People constantly find new ways to use more IP addresses. 4.3B is just too small, even with NAT.
The fact that we are deploying CGNAT everywhere should have made that obvious enough.
Neither solution works for me though, as someone whose IPv4 connnectivity is behind a CGNAT.
ALL ISPs in my country have deployed CGNAT so there's no "changing ISP" for me either. IPv6 is the only solution left unless I want to pay a premium to get one of those public IPv4 addresses. Really, single-layered IPv4 NAT can't last forever. The address space of IPv4 is simply too limited.