A couple of years later ipv6 became unnecessary. A big driver for ipv6 at the time was routers not being able to manage the increasing size of the core routingtable. Then 2 years later betterhardware and routing table compression became available and ipv6 became unnecessary.
Uh, no it didn't? Routing table size is still something of a problem, especially as v4 continues to fragment more and more, but also the main driver was insufficient IP addresses in v4 and that problem hasn't even slightly gone away.