My meaning is that good URL design was more prevalent when people consciously included more links to other websites within their own website. This is because making well formed URLs is of importance if you think people are actually going to take that URL and link it somewhere. The rest of my comment is snark around SPAs, because I think they conversely do not often do URL design well (manipulating the DOM off the back of JSON REST API calls, rather than guiding the state of the page off the URL, allows one not to have to think about it as much as one should).

I hope that clears things up.