Let's say you have a recipe site and you have recipes by vegetables. If you let people click from the tomatoes and then into a tomato soup recipe, should the URL structure be domain.com/tomatoes/tomato-soup-recipe/html? John Mueller from Google said it does not matter.
John Mueller said on Twitter that url folder structure does not need to match the content folder structure. He said "for Google it doesn't really matter." "URLs are primarily identifiers. Clean URL structure is generally a good practice regardless," he added.
Here is the full context:
For Google it doesn't really matter -- URLs are primarily identifiers. Clean URL structure is generally a good practice regardless.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) November 22, 2017
So no need to go nuts about this for your SEO and 100% do not change what you have already published to match this type of flow. But if you have new pages, just keep the URLs short and specific to the page content as possible.
Forum discussion at Twitter.