Guessable web URLs?

Recently I've landed on a blog post from 2011 titled "URL as UI". One claim caught my eye in particular - "an ideal URL is guessable":

Synonyms should ideally redirect. If you have a support page at /support and a user types /help, is that really such a bad request? Don't show them a 404 — send them to the page they're looking for!

Yes, in principle that looks like a great idea. You show thoughtfulness, care, you guide your user.

Also, as we are in the area of text input UIs (after all, we are considering user manually entering or changing URL of the web page - "guessing it"), it's only natural to note similarity of this idea to the existence of conventions in CLIs used in various userspace ecosystems.

For example, in GNU tooling, it's almost a given that I can ask for --help, for being --verbose or to get --version, even without studying any manual first.

But do users actually navigate the web like that?

My intuition is that they (we) tweak URLs only if they (we) already see some structure and for some reason it's easier to change it directly, than to use actual page interface. Examples would be navigating paginated lists, tweaking search results, changing names of user profiles shown, checking (for a friend) if the backend verifies permissions correctly...

But to just blindly navigate to /help or /about and expect to land somewhere? Somehow I don't see it. Yes, some fringe internet dwellers may try /feed or /blog, but if I were to guess, that's about it. Link to it or it didn't happen.

There is simply no established behavioral pattern of such usage. I'm willing to bet that this relates not only to "normies", but also to so called power users.

Yes, /help redirecting to /support makes sense, if /help existed before and doesn't anymore. But that's a different case than guessable URLs.

But hey, this is n=1. Maybe there is some grumpy greybeard Links/Lynx user, or some Nielsen Norman Group article willing to make me look silly?