Maybe they didn't know there is a difference? I'm from Europe and I didn't. You register to be able to vote? Why isn't every citizen automatically allowed to vote?
IKEA, SAP, Beretta, Airbus, Spotify, Linux, Prometheus, Grafana, Booking.com just from the top of my head of things that are proof of European innovation and tech sector.
IPV6 commonly does that. Your next hop is installed as a link-local fe80-entry which is derived from the mac address. Not exactly what you're after, but removes the IP numbering need.
That's not the "cattle vs. pet" as I understand it. The servers are identical, i.e. cattle. This is just a case of sticky sessions. It's a common pattern to help latency and keep resource usage down.
+1. When I had to use AWS for batch workloads, which at the time at least didn't have a TTL attribute on VMs, I made sure that the VM first scheduled a shutdown in like 30 min if the test was supposed to only run in 10 min.