Gonna try to say this in a different way: SEO, as well as actual best practices on the web, have nothing to do with Hugo or WordPress.
A permalink or permanent link is a URL that is intended to remain unchanged for many years into the future, yielding a hyperlink that is less susceptible to link rot.
The developers behind WordPress and Hugo look at best practices, and implement them as sensibly as possible given the underlying technology.
WordPress has a database and needs a method to identify each piece of data, and permalinks make that easier on humans to query the database. Hugo’s structure is based on a filesystem, with configurable options to produce a different filesystem (produced in public).
So comparing what WordPress does to Hugo isn’t useful, in my opinion. Looking at a best practice and asking how to accomplish it in your tool of choice the the path forward, um, Princess Leia. 