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Roughly speaking, the most popular Ethereum client: geth determines its external IP by inspecting the endpoint from ENRequest's PONG message. The local IP address which receives most statements is considered to be the external IP. Since all the bootnodes are IPv4 peers, IPv6 nodes are unable to join P2P network in practice.
Is there any reliable IPv6 bootnode?
Try to answer my own question here.
According to ethernode, 78% Ethereum mainnet clients are using geth. During geth's initializing phase, it will randomly communicate with 3 bootnodes. Since all the bootnodes run on IPv4, it's impossible for IPv6 node to join the network.
Much like a democracy society, the majority wins. My limited guess is today's IPv6 is not mature enough to meet the latency and availability needs of a global-scale decentralized P2P network.
