This seems really irrelevant to the browser. I wonder why this was standardized, JavaScript is easily powerful enough to express this. Surely it hasn't been a performance bottleneck for it needing a native api?

I agree with the other two comments, surely almost every frontend webdev has implemented a router in their career unless they never strayed from the major frameworks. It's really not a complicated thing to have to build. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth but I don't see why we're being given this one.