That's not the reason why "dotfiles" are hidden, that's the reason that files whose names begin with dots are hidden. "Dotfile" refers specifically to user-loca

That's not the reason why "dotfiles" are hidden, that's the reason that files whose names begin with dots are hidden. "Dotfile" refers specifically to user-local configuration files, which almost always have filenames that begin with a dot, or are located within a directory whose name begins with a dot. Dotfiles are hidden because some people decided that configuration files ought to be hidden from the user during normal activities and so they took advantage of the originally-a-bug-feature of hidden files. This became the standard practice because at the time there was no agreed-upon location for user-local configuration (as existed for system-level config in the form of /etc), so the most logical thing to do was to just put config files inside $HOME. This clutters up the home directory, and so hiding these configuration files made sense.