Usually, people (who I think pay services like bitly) can use minimized urls with some readable text, not random letters, this is to make the url more readable and visible.

Anyway, for here in Singapore, what I'm talking about generally are government websites, which in SG are plentiful and well used. Things like where to find ART kits or information on GST vouchers or things like that. This is information many people are likely to access via a website, and especially trust given it's a gov website. The government often already have nifty, readable urls already for these links, like gowhere.gov.sg/art and so don't need QR codes.

I trusted using curl to find out it just returns a HTTP 404 page :)

Doesn't look like a 404 to me

Hehe, nice trick!