I think you are talking about client's navigational state. The original title of this post was "app state ...". Still it is not clear about state of what.

Navigational state need not be confused with app state. Also talking about "state" as in "state machine" etc used to sound pretty academic with obscure meaning of the word "state". When someone says "state machine" they are basically saying "I'm a PhD and you are not". There are simpler and more crisp ways to convey things rather than via obscurity.

My point was a linguistic-conceptual one, that a location fully describing a state is not a contradiction in terms, and hence it’s not necessarily a misuse of the “URL” concept regarding the “locator” aspect. Navigational versus application state is irrelevant to that argument.