Even if you know what it means, it's still not suitable for reading. If you saw that in search results, how will you decide if you prefer ?id=7678729 or ?id=22107823 ? They're not even sequential. You can't remember it from something you've seen before.
Yes keep them stupid and hide things from them. That's an important part of how computers became popular. A lot of people were excluded in the days of command line everything.
There's another comment here which sums up my thoughts on this perfectly: "Don't make me think" has turned into "Don't let me think", and that is a disturbingly dangerous direction for freedom from corporate/government control.
Society would be very different today if, several hundred years ago, the "ruling elite" decided that literacy should be discouraged.
Absolute rubbish. That is obviously a number identifying the item. I wish a lot of URLs would be shorter, but that's different. I also offer this piece of evidence:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729
People are intelligent. They can learn and see things if you give them a chance, and you're basically advocating for keeping them stupid and unknowing by hiding things from them... why?