I don't think it would be confusing because as you say, there are enough indicators within the page (and I suspect most people don't pay much attention to the URL).

The way that the canonical reference for the site name worked, we still see (for example), the steemit.com URL that we'd expect in the address bar but the hidden code would tell the search engines where the canonical source was - which is what I was also imagining here.

The downside with this is that without a link to the canonical URL elsewhere in the site, Google (and probably other search engines) wouldn't have the canonical URL indexed - which according to ChatGPT, would have a detrimental affect upon SEO.

This feels like a really sweet solution and has been fairly straightforward to implement. Incidentally, the first tag on your posts was different to the default - do you use a different interface to post your content?