This is clearly wrong and brings the judgement of the author into question.
People care that they are on "Facebook", "Google", "Youtube". They are not remembering that a stupid cat video belongs to URL: ?v=X2KsttcwC04
However, we only care because we know what a URL is, and what the different components mean.
The average user doesn't understand the intricacies of URLs, nor should they have to. Parsing URLs unambiguously is hard even for programmers, and has been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities.
I think there should always be an option to show the full URL bar, but I can't really argue for it being the default behavior anymore.
"A proper Tab bar, with as much horizontal space as possible, to be able to open a lot of tabs and read at least a small part of their titles."
Which suggests ignorance of vertical tabs.
I'm wondering if the author hasn't spent much time with the long tail of tech-savvy users. The emphasis added to "any" is unfortunate.
A fair chunk of Tridactyl users hide the address bar; I find I very rarely need to know that information.