That was never the intent of hiding the path, it was and is to help users identify what a site’s domain actually is. To distinguish malicious sites with recognizable domain-like strings in/overlapping their paths as well as malicious sites with recognizable domains as subdomains. It’s not a panacea, but it’s effective. Chrome (and IIRC Firefox) also experimented with similar approaches before ultimately splitting the difference with higher contrast text for the domain.