I wasn't aware of this, I'd seen those URLs before but only in the context of Chinese ones and thought it was Chinese-specific.
It's interesting because I just went down an apparent rabbit hole inplementing Byte-level encoding for using language models with unicode. There each byte in a unicode character is mapped to a printable character that goes up to 255 < ord(x) < 511 (I don't remember the highest but the point is each byte is mapped to another printable unicode character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
https://www.punycoder.com/