It only does this on mobile, as far as I can tell; using desktop Safari as my primary browser, I'm not seeing this.

It does it on desktop too. You must’ve disabled in it settings

Apple has it's own goals of hiding technical information from the user.

hmm, the only thing it hides for me is the protocol, and that one is easy understand: a padlock shown: https. "Not Secure":http.

To get what you're seeing, I had to turn on the option to see the full URL. Otherwise it just shows the domain. That was several years ago though, so maybe it's no the default anymore.

I get it though, most people really only care about the domain and in fact, trimming everything else makes the actual domain easier to spot when it's not the domain you wanted, such as in a phishing attempt.

Safari has little to none marketshare.

17% is little to none?

More like 3% on the desktop. Mobile is not really relevant here. The URL bar on those devices is obviously shorter to begin with because of less display width. So just showing the hostname is not much different than showing the hostname + 5 characters.

Reminds me of a great phishing attack I saw the other year:

"https://support.google.com.verify.x82loo2a.com"

Of course, in a tiny url bar, you'd just see "https://support.google.com.veri".