It depends on the hardware. There may be offloading for h.264, VP8, for different profiles and for encoding or decoding. But not all combinations are available on all machines. So software decoding may still be needed.
Now software decoders are often written with some hand-optimized assembly loops, but those optimized variants don't cover all possible target platforms and not every single loop is hand-optimized. So everything that's either a plain-C fallback or just hasn't been optimized can benefit from compiler improvements.
IPv6 does not really help with user tracking. IPv6 privacy extensions rotate the suffix your browser uses for outgoing connections on a daily basis. And it's enabled by default on most operating systems.
It was somewhat broken for a while on windows 10, but they fixed that in march.
> And yet, even in this position, I think having IPv6 native inside of a production network isn't absolutely necessary
Not necessary, but it could be quite useful. The 64bit suffix of ULA addresses lets you group your containers into separate blocks with static prefixes. E.g. you could always have the :0000 - :FFFF block be your reverse proxies, the next block the storage shards and so on.
Why should they? Java development is more open now than it has ever been and non-oracle entities have already taken on larger roles than before. To me it looks like things are working.
Now software decoders are often written with some hand-optimized assembly loops, but those optimized variants don't cover all possible target platforms and not every single loop is hand-optimized. So everything that's either a plain-C fallback or just hasn't been optimized can benefit from compiler improvements.