The real picture is that IP addresses are allocated hierarchically and there are multiple entities at all levels except the root, all of which run out separately.
IANA (the root of the tree, the people who allocate addresses to the regional registries) ran out of /8s in Feb 2011. The regional registries (there are five of them; these are the people that allocate addresses to ISP) have their allocated pools of /8s which ran out at different times: APNIC ran out in Apr 2011 (that's the story you linked), RIPE in 2012, LACNIC in 2014 and ARIN just now. (AFRINIC still has a few years to go, although they won't if everybody tries to get their addresses from there.)
Then there are the ISPs, who allocate addresses to their customers. ISPs will tell you that "we have plenty of addresses left" -- except the ones who don't -- but at some point all ISPs (or perhaps more importantly, your ISP) are going to move into the "don't" category.
And finally, ISP customers (i.e. you) allocate addresses to networks. Except you've probably never experienced this, because we've been short on v4 addresses for long enough that many ISPs don't (can't) give you enough IPs for your networks, and haven't for years and years. You probably grew up with this and consider it normal; it's not.
I don't know when you're going to go from "we seem to be trucking on just fine" to realizing that we have a problem -- I'd say we already do, since lots of people waste lots of time and money due to NAT, but perhaps for you it'll take your ISP giving you an RFC 1918 address on your upstream before you realize. Or maybe you have infinite time and money and don't mind the headaches caused by many layers of NAT and all the workarounds needed to deal with them, and you don't mind paying programmers to write workarounds into software, and you don't care about all the things we could've had if the internet had been up to providing them. But hopefully I've shed some light on the highly-complicated reality of "guy A allocates to guy B who allocates to guy C".