>> Parent seems to care more about 'not polluting something i see all the time'.

> Yes, this.

Like "My Documents" (or "Documents" nowadays)? Now that's some dumping ground.

That's bad too, but at least it's not right in my home folder! When I have to use Windows, I basically just avoid using Documents for files. (But my daily driver is an ancient version of OS X, which has ~/Library for these things.)

Oh, mac has the same issue and for the same reason: the same programs will create the same garbage.

~/Library also isn't something that is used to be; it was good idea, but mostly ignored. Basically similar idea as XDG_(CONFIG|CACHE|DATA)_DIR.

What's worst, is that many projects ignore any effort to move them to XDG schema. They take the approach, that they always did it this way, it works, so why changing it.

Dot files in my homedir on Sonoma machine:

    .CFUserTextEncoding
    .DS_Store
    .Trash/
    .Xauthority
    .amt
    .android/
    .anyconnect
    .bash_history
    .cache/
    .cargo/
    .config/
    .cups/
    .degit/
    .deno/
    .docker/
    .eclipse/
    .emacs.d/
    .gitconfig
    .gitignore_global
    .grass7/
    .hex/
    .homeassistant/
    .ipython/
    .java.login.config
    .jupyter/
    .kube/
    .lemminx/
    .lesshst
    .local/
    .matplotlib/
    .mix/
    .mume/
    .node/
    .notable.json
    .npm/
    .nvm/
    .oh-my-zsh/
    .oracle_jre_usage/
    .pip/
    .profile
    .psql_history
    .python_history
    .rest-client/
    .rustup/
    .sqitch/
    .ssh/
    .subversion/
    .swiftpm/
    .thumbnails/
    .viminfo
    .vscode/
    .wget-hsts
    .wine/
    .yarn/
    .yarnrc
    .zcompdump
    .zsh_history
    .zsh_sessions/
    .zshenv
    .zshrc

Many of these you can move if you wanted. For instance, git looks in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

My home directory is much cleaner because I've made a concerted effort to keep it that way, in a couple of cases even recompiling software. I found this much more difficult on Linux.