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Isn't storing state in urls and then using a url shortener just a key/value store with extra steps?

But with added session id energy too!

True, though I think the differences around shareability matter— a mapping-table entry is immutable, whereas even a non-logged-in session token is probably not.

Well, there are limits to the lengths of URLs in much of the internet’s infrastructure, so better compression could still be useful.

This is the critical point to make. Paste a few long texts into the boxes and the url goes into the hundreds of thousands of characters long, whereas this says that anything more than about 2000 chars puts you into uncertain territory:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maxim...

I agree, same reason people use json in the first place despite the inefficiency, it's easier.