That's not really how data is requested. Most of these identifiers are foreign keys - they exist in a larger object graph. Most systems of records are too large for people to associate surrogate keys to anything meaningful - they can easily have hundreds of billions of records.

Rather, users traverse that through that object graph, narrowing a range of keys of interest.

This hacker news article was given a surrogate key, 46272487. From that, you can determine what it links to, the name/date/author of the submission, comments, etc.

46272487 means absolutely nothing to anybody involved. But if you wanted to see submissions from user pil0u, or submissions submissions on 2025-12-15, or submissions pertaining to UUID, 46272487 would in that in that result set. Once 46272487 joins out to all of its other tables, you can populate a list that includes their user name, title, domain, etc.

Do not encode identifying information in unique identifiers! The entire world of software is built on surrogate keys and they work wonderfully.