As I mentioned below, this is just one of four proposals that we're making at IETF about reclaiming unused IPv4 address space. The other three proposals are
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-unicas...
In each case, the address space in question was reserved a long time ago (during the 1980s) for reasons that have not proven necessary or that are no longer applicable.
It is indeed a big undertaking to change this behavior everywhere, but we propose that it will be a gradual process. It turns out that 240/4 is already widely supported (implementers liked the idea when it was previously proposed at IETF in 2008), while we've also gotten patches into Linux for the 0/8 and lowest address behavior, and now in FreeBSD for the lowest address behavior as well. (The lowest address was originally reserved for an "alternative broadcast address" because 4.2BSD chose it as the segment-directed broadcast address in 1983, before there was a standard to say which address to use for this purpose.)
There are lots of other complexities and history that I'm happy to talk about if people are interested.
The amount of IPv4 space still "reserved for future use" in 240/4 is 2²⁸ addresses, or 1/16 of all of IPv4!
Edit: people who are especially interested in this topic can also watch me presenting on this for 15 minutes at IETF112 last week.
When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!