I think there'd have been confusion either way, with people expecting to put the URLs into a browser rather than a social app, especially as there's no uniform way of recognising that they're Fediverse-related without visiting the URL first, so I think having an indicator of that there is worth it, but e.g. the masto.ai/@mg style URL are a lot better than the masto.ai/users/mg.
The webfinger support also potentially enables some cool functionality by letting users use the same handle for multiple services. That said, I'd love to see someone set up a webfinger service that 1) lets people bring their own custom domains, 2) shows a linktree style UI if you hit host/username, 3) optionally redirects or transparently caches certain settings, 4) offer to transparently redirect requests to the user page a given resource based on Accept: header where possible (e.g. ActivityPub/ActivityStreams technically expect 'application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams" ' with the caveat that the "profile" bit is likely to be left out by a lot of clients)
The webfinger support also potentially enables some cool functionality by letting users use the same handle for multiple services. That said, I'd love to see someone set up a webfinger service that 1) lets people bring their own custom domains, 2) shows a linktree style UI if you hit host/username, 3) optionally redirects or transparently caches certain settings, 4) offer to transparently redirect requests to the user page a given resource based on Accept: header where possible (e.g. ActivityPub/ActivityStreams technically expect 'application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams" ' with the caveat that the "profile" bit is likely to be left out by a lot of clients)