[musage]

> 1) there are now an infinite number of URLs for every one of your pages that may end up separately stored on various services (mitigated for only some kinds of service if you redirect to correct)

No need to redirect, that's what canonical links are for:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types

I don't disagree in that I mostly dislike URL slugs, too. Except for some hub pages ("photos", "blog", etc.), a numerical ID is more than enough. But the combination of ordering and display modes and filtering can still amount to a huge number of combinations, so canonical links are still needed - to have as many options for the user as possible and allow them all to be bookmarked, but also give search engines a hint on what minor permutations they can ignore safely.

I wish search engines would completely ignore words in the URL. If it's not in the page (or the "metadata" of actual content on pages linking to it, and so on), screw the URL. If it is in the page (and the URL), you don't need the URL. As long as they are incentivized, we'll have fugly URL schemes.