Using a numeric ID + ignored path part is easy to implement, but actually using the textual part without an exposed ID seems more elegant to me. Tip for implementing that:

* have a separate table that maps slugs to IDs, allowing many-to-one relationship, because content's title will be updated, and you don't want to break old links.

* long slugs will get truncated by users. A zero-cost way to recover from that is `select id where slug >= ? order by slug limit 1`

* in either case don't forget to redirect to the canonical URL, so that people can't create duplicate or misleading URLs on your site.