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Fair enough...
Because there is no internal space in a URL no amount of telling CSS to wrap text worked.
The website monkeys at our place pointed me at: https://kenneth.io/blog/2012/03/04/word-wrapping-hypernation-using-css/ which they say works across all major supported browsers.
Greenbank-
Your website monkeys are partially right.
It does work, on "supported" browsers, and it works inconsistently, and it doesn't work on older IE or the various older browsers shipped to phones, and it doesn't work on URLs in anchor tags when there are no good candidate places to break the text.
I know all of that because we did it. We tried the hyphenation CSS and found it to be too inconsistent across browsers, and too problematic on some special things (link anchors).
Not that any of that matters... one can click the link to end up at the destination. The text between anchor tags is not the link itself, it's just an indicator of where the link will go, and I have zero issue with using ­ to solve the problem of long URLs breaking page layout.
Actually it's not even long URLs, just long solid blocks of text will be broken if there are no candidate hyphenation points within it.
Velocio
Ah right... yes, that is international.
And as you say... clicking on the link works.
The ­ unicode characters were added after a number of very long URLs were posted and broke the layout of certain long posts (notably the "lists of" links).
Because there is no internal space in a URL no amount of telling CSS to wrap text worked. The only solution was to add a form of zero-width whitespace that would allow browsers to wrap a long and solid URL at certain points. We add a ­ every 25 chars so that the browser width can be used to wrap at the appropriate point.
As you point out, clicking the link and following the href still works. In fact, the href is the only thing we will ever guarantee to work.