Update: There is an even better explanation (imo) further above:
A URI is represented as a sequence of characters, not as a sequence
of octets. That is because URI might be “transported” by means that
are not through a computer network, e.g., printed on paper, read over
the radio, etc.
and
For original character sequences that contain non-ASCII characters,
however, the situation is more difficult. Internet protocols that
transmit octet sequences intended to represent character sequences
are expected to provide some way of identifying the charset used, if
there might be more than one [RFC2277]. However, there is currently
no provision within the generic URI syntax to accomplish this
identification. An individual URI scheme may require a single
charset, define a default charset, or provide a way to indicate the
charset used.
Because it is stated in the RFC:
2.4. Escape Sequences
Data must be escaped if it does not have a representation using an
unreserved character; this includes data that does not correspond to
a printable character of the US-ASCII coded character set, or that
corresponds to any US-ASCII character that is disallowed, as
explained below.
and
2.4.2. When to Escape and Unescape
A URI is always in an “escaped” form, since escaping or unescaping a
completed URI might change its semantics. Normally, the only time
escape encodings can safely be made is when the URI is being created
from its component parts; each component may have its own set of
characters that are reserved, so only the mechanism responsible for
generating or interpreting that component can determine whether or not escaping a character will change its semantics. Likewise, a URI
must be separated into its components before the escaped characters
within those components can be safely decoded.In some cases, data that could be represented by an unreserved
character may appear escaped; for example, some of the unreserved
“mark” characters are automatically escaped by some systems. If the
given URI scheme defines a canonicalization algorithm, then
unreserved characters may be unescaped according to that algorithm.
For example, “%7e” is sometimes used instead of “~” in an http URL
path, but the two are equivalent for an http URL.Because the percent “%” character always has the reserved purpose of
being the escape indicator, it must be escaped as “%25” in order to
be used as data within a URI. Implementers should be careful not to
escape or unescape the same string more than once, since unescaping
an already unescaped string might lead to misinterpreting a percent
data character as another escaped character, or vice versa in the
case of escaping an already escaped string.