Why do I get different browser behaviour when attempting to reach bitcoin.stackexchange.com and the alias of its IP in /etc/hosts?

I haven't found any browser that supports aliases defined in /etc/hosts even when single terms (without having to prepend in the browser with http://) are not interpreted as search terms for the default search engine (the case with badwolf browser ). Aliases work when prepended with http:// , e.g. http://bse but having to type http://defeats the purpuse of using them. Cloudflare does not allow to access bitcoin.stackexchange.com via an alias, defined as 172.64.144.30 bitcoin.stackexchange.com bse

Error 1003 Ray ID: 85750e9fc9b65e4d • 2024-02-18 08:56:29 UTC
Direct IP access not allowed
What happened?
You've requested an IP address that is part of the Cloudflare network. A valid Host header must be supplied to reach the desired website.

When I attempt to reach bitcoin.stackexchange.com I do not get any error from Cloudflare. 1. Am I sending a host header when attempting to reach bitcoin.stackexchange.com from a desktop PC with 172.64.144.30 bitcoin.stackexchange.com bse appended to /etc/hosts? 2. Why do I get different browser behaviour when attempting to reach http://bse and bitcoin.stackexchange.com in the browser? 3. Are there any settings in browsers such as Brave, Firefox (about:config ?), Chromium that I could apply to use my aliases seamlessly? Other than in /etc/hosts my DNS queries are resolved by by the home router as shown by the content of my /etc/resolv.conf

# Generated by Connection Manager
search home 
nameserver 192.168.1.1

The research I did is man hosts. The hypothetical purpose of appending 172.64.144.30 bitcoin.stackexchange.com bse to /etc/hosts is limiting the number of certain DNS queries (that may make my profiling seem too radical and hence result in targeted surveillence) to the dns server of my router. I am aware of the possibility of reverse-DNS-lookups but let this be outside of the scope of the question.