critical difference here was also the consumption of oil. It’s gone down significantly since then as processes have moved to other materials and more efficient methods of manufacturing,
Do you have a source for that? Because this seems to suggest fossil fuel and oil demand might of roughly plateaued the last few years, the dip looks pretty welly correlated to Covid.
IPv4 addresses are a static pool, yes. But we’re continually using them more efficiently, the same as Oil. The difference being that Oil has a limit on the amount of energy contained in its chemical bonds, but you could quite happily host 1,000 or 10,000 websites on a single server.
North America is an interesting example here, because North America HIT peak oil once, way back in the 80’s, and it was only with the invention of Fracking that it came back.
Once upon a time people debated if virtual hosts were best practice or if that would affect their SEO. We’ve definitely progressed since then, both to conserve IP addresses, but mainly because DDOS prevention is best done centralised (Looking at you Cloudflare).