Context:
People have been asking for IPv6 Support on GitHub since years (probably a decade by now)
… and someone even got so annoyed that they decided to setup a dedicated website for checking this: https://isgithubipv6.live/
You’d better hope that you can NAT ipv6 because if you aren’t behind a CGNAT and then your LAN is completely exposed without a NAT you’re very likely going to have devices exploited.
NATs on people’s boundary has been doing pretty much all of the heavy lifting for everyone’s security at home.
The word you are looking for is firewall not NAT.
NAT does not provide security whatsoever. If the NAT mapped your (internal IP, internal port) to a certain (external IP, external port) and you do not have a firewall enabled, everyone can reach your device by simply connecting to that (external IP, external port).
I haven’t seen routers that do not come with IPv6 firewalls enabled by default.
The word you are looking for is firewall not NAT.
No the word I’m looking for is the NAT. It was not designed for security but coincidentally it is doing the heavy lifting for home network security because it is dropping packets from connections originating from outside the network, barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.
Consumer router firewalls are generally trash, certainly aren’t layer 7 firewalls protecting from all the SMB, printer, AD, etc etc vulnerabilities and definitely are not doing the heavy lifting.
By and large automated attacks are not thwarted by the firewall but by the one-way NAT.
Consumer router firewalls are generally trash
[Citation needed]
They are literally piggybacking on the netfilter module of Linux. I don’t see how that’s trash