alt Hacker NewsI suppose we fundamentally disagree that it's meaningful or material whether NAT can provide something the stateful firewalling has handled more completely since the first shipping implementation and that this defines what the purpose and introduction of NAT to the market was supposed to be.
There's no uncertainty at all about what NAT was meant to do; you can just read Cisco's introduction to the PIX, or it's statement about the acquisition of NTI, which are online.
Network administrators (less so security engineers) don't want NAT to be a security feature, so they've retconned a principle of security engineering that doesn't exist. If people were honest about it and just said they'd prefer to work on networks where less distortive middlebox features provide the same security controls, I'd have nothing to argue about.
But this article makes the claim that "NAT isn’t actually a security feature". That's simply false. People need to stop rebroadcasting this canard.