[cxr]

URLs are not strictly technological oddities. Their closest equivalents are footnotes/citations.

Marginalizing URLs as something that only "people with technical skills" do (and/or should?) care about is no different from any other phenomenon where you take some boring, everyday, mostly unremarkable practice that doesn't involve the use of a computer and then change it where the moment someone gets a whiff of the presence of a computer in the pipeline they throw up their hands and say, "I don't know"/"I don't get this"/"I'm not a computer person".

It's really the doing of both non-technical people and technical people in and adjacent to the modern software industry alike that most people consider URLs gobbledygook instead of what they are: identifiers for a given work. It's especially perverse that the practices of both classes are responsible for most URLs being unsuitable for use Works Cited pages. That could definitely use some fixing, but we do such a poor job (in the US at least) already at explaining, during high school when it's supposed to be covered, the value of proper sourcing and citing that even smart kids come away thinking in terms of superficialities like the rigidity of formats and citation style rather than the actual fundamentals of scholarship. URLs are not exceptional in that regard.