[Emmanuel Dabbie Botchway]

IPv4 has lasted so long because of its massive global deployments and workarounds like NAT, CIDR, and Private addressing that delayed address exhaustion. However it only supports about 4.3 billion addresses, which is insufficient for growing IoT ecosystem. Techniques likes NAT also break end-to-end connectivity and increase network complexity. IPv4 lacks built-in modern security features and creates insufficiencies due to address scarcity.