I don't believe that they can, not unencoded. Check out the grammar in the relevant RFC[0], as well as the discussion about URL-unsafe characters in the RFC that's updated by 3986 [1], from which I'll quote below.

> Characters can be unsafe for a number of reasons. ... The characters "<" and ">" are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text

Also note the "APPENDIX" section on page 22 of RFC1738, which provides recommendations for embedding URLs in other contexts (like, suchas, in an essay, email, or internet forum post.)

Do you have standards documents that disagree with these IETF ones?

If you're using the observed behavior of your browser's address bar as your proof that ">" is valid in a URL, do note that the URL

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826199>hello there

might appear to contain a space and the ">" character, but it is actually represented as

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826199%3Ehello%20there

behind the scenes. Your web browser is pretty-printing it for you so it looks nicer and is easier to read.

[0] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#appendix-A>

[1] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1738#section-2.2>