I mean having a public address doesnt mean it has to be publicly routable. Same thing applies to ipv6.
I speak as someone who worked at an institute that had similar abundance of address space.
Indeed, the tragedy of the IPv4+NAT stockholm syndrome is that people view having to use ambiguous addresses as access control and can't distinguish reachability vs addressing.
In my case it was publicly routable. The ips and ports of key infra were on https://www.shodan.io/.
My workstation used to have a public address system it was awesome.