Clean URL is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_URL

A common pattern is

GET /articles
POST /articles
PUT /articles/:id
DELETE /articles/:id

Completely understandable, if you are doing it for SEO, but do RESTful API even need that? There might even be a security risk.

Some tutorials seem to explicitly prefer this, but why?

Actually, if querystring is used instead, it might be easier for axios + TypeScript (or any URL builders).