> "No one wanting to bother with port forwarding" is largely a matter of shitty UX on the home gateway side and laziness on the side of the operator. Same with UPnP.

If you try to use those port forwarding hacks, you force every single piece of software to deal with the fact that the IP address it sees for itself is not the IP address its peer sees for it. And you force every single protocol design to allow for that possibility. Add in UPNP, and now you have to implement a whole extra (badly designed) protocol in parallel with the actual application.

It's not trivial to even discover the address your peer is seeing; even now there's a huge diversity of nasty unreliable hacks for doing it.

HTTP isn't the world. In fact, HTTP becoming "the world" was another part of the problem.