alt Hacker Newshe's answered this question a few times. It's basically "how was I supposed to have any idea what the implications were?" He said something like "16 bit, 32 bit, 48 bit addressing, it felt all equally improbable. Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
> "... Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need."
If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.