URIs are not supposed to be part of the UI/UX, but they unavoidably have leaked and will continue to leak into it. Therefore, making those URIs most likely to leak into the UI/UX be user-friendly is very good advice.
Because if you have enough of them for internal purposes then they can't have meaning to users.
> It seems like the opposite has happened. URIs were the default navigation UX, but we are slowly pushing them away.
URIs were the default entry point for navigation, and they still are. That's one way in which they leak, but these are intentional so maybe best not called "leaks". There's also the URIs that leak in other ways, like in the browser status bar, and so on.
Well, thats the thing, most of the advice has a bit of truth to it.
However it is very limited benefit to the extent that the larger argument/conclusion (shorter URLs are better) is wrong.
It ignores many valid points raised here, like URLs that include structure (be it date-based, or taxonomy, or hierarchy) provide immense value in many cases.
