That's how analogies usually go

It's not a good one. The seatbelt is analogous to say, double checking if you really want to download thriller.mp3.exe.

Hiding the URL is like blocking out the windshield and telling the user to trust the GPS.

Another way to look at it is if you are in an accident, a seatbelt will 99.99% of the time stop you from being ejected from the car. A hard hat will prevent your skull from fracturing when hit in the head. Goggles keep foreign matter out of your eye. The SafeBrowsing blacklist prevents Chrome from automatically loading malicious payloads on unwary users. So in what way does hiding the URL measurably stop the dangerous action? It doesn't. A less hyperbolic parallel would be how cars have changed from showing gauges for engine performance and have only a single "check engine" light for any problem detected by the ECM.

That said I think this change is inevitable. My experience with non-technical users is that the URL is irrelevant Most do not know the difference between typing an address and typing a search phrase.

My brother still lives because he crashed sideways into a tree.

Wearing a belt would have suffocated / decapitated him, because the car seat moved to the front.

I like that analogy :)

And: seatbelts have negligible downsides, and are very hard to use for any purpose other than accident restraint.

The analogy to hiding the URL would be something like a seatbelt that only unlatched at the car's stop only in neighborhoods it considered "safe".

That's how bad analogies go.

Seatbelts in Europe are required by law, in Brasil it's possible that there are no seatbelts because it's cheaper.

Seatbelts make it safer unregarding your driving skill. As an experienced développer, I want to see the URL. I want to copy the original one.

URL's are useful outside security. That's why it's one of the SEO variables.

It's a bad analogy

Just to point out, in Brasil seatbelts are also required by law, so it´s not possible that "there are no seatbelts because it´s cheaper".

Ford focus is the safest car in Europe. In another country not, it even didn't had seatbelts. I thought it was Brasil sorry

Source : cousin who has a garage and sells Ford.

I was looking past the headline to the actual content of the article, which was much less click-bait-y: "rework how browsers convey what website you're looking at, so that you don't have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs".

The article never once says "hide the URL". We have no idea what form their solution will take (and they probably don't, either, yet) but they make it clear that they know the URL itself does have value and they're not going to just hide it.