I thoroughly disagree. There are a lot of challenges and opportunities with web apps that you do not have in the same way in other UI environments. Having a way of enumerating different states of the application, and jumping between those states (URIs) is just one.
Most web apps treat different routes as different screens, effectively, to use a piece of jargon from a bygone time. A URI is usually just a parameterized screen; IDs in the URI determine which bits of data the app is viewing / editing, no more or less than parameters to a Visual Basic or Delphi form.
Can you suggest a few others? I don’t see how the issues that arise with the example you gave are any different to things like parsing command line options or acting on shortcuts in native UIs.