Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
You can clean these URLs, but if you want to preserve SEO, you'll need to write 301 (Moved Permanently) redirects. I have done it and didn't penalised my SEO. Once you don't get any traffic to the old page, you can safely remove the redirects.
Full answer by Manuel Alcaraz: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/132836 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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