The issue the GP is making is that rather than devising a whole new protocol altogether, including resolution and assignments, other things like that, adoption likely would have been much faster and wider.

Had the original plan been simply "extend address space" instead of "extend address space and while we are at it revamp and rewrite every part of the whole scheme including assignment, discovery, and everything else we see wrong with ipv4"; we would be in a much better place.

Adding extra address bytes would of course require new changes across the internet, but that change would be easier to swallow compared to having to rip and replace large swaths of processes to make ipv6 work because of all of the other changes that came with ipv6.

Also, the stupid idea of turning addresses to hex as the default, and more specifically the dumb :: shortening methods really made it confusing for everyone and didnt help at all in the efforts.