I pinged every IP address that wasn't reserved. The image is 8k by 8k and is re-encoded as an AVIF to be friendlier to mobile devices. Like every other survey done, it is using a Hilbert Curve to convert the linear address space to a contiguous 2d space. The hotter the colors (blue is coolest), the denser the ping responses were.
(If you are interested the full-resolution pyramidal-tiled TIFF can be downloaded and viewed in QuPath on desktop. I've also compressed the ping response data into its own format down to about 150 MB. PM me for a link)
Here is a 2006 survey to compare.
Some observations: Big Tech (USA) is in the top left. US government allocations, for the most part, did not respond to any pings. And maybe you didn't realize this before, but Multicast (Class D) & Class E consume a whopping 12% of the IPv4 range.
This wasn't a "lie to children" - that's a simplification. This was like explaining the Pythagorean theorem by introducing imaginary numbers.
Almost nobody ever uses hex to represent IP addresses ever. There is no reason to bring up hex. It complicates things rather than simplifies.
And to say "[t]hey are actually hex numbers from 0 to FF" is just misleading to the point of wrong. Numbers are not "hex" or "base 10" or "binary". They're numbers. We only represent them as hex or base10. They aren't "different numbers".
And in this case we almost always use base10. SO WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HEX?