While I strongly support the idea of allowing users to control the location of their config files, I don’t really like the XDG spec, specifically the part where

While I strongly support the idea of allowing users to control the location of their config files, I don’t really like the XDG spec, specifically the part where setting nothing ends up putting files in two or three disparate directories. Also, it’s not “respecting your users” to change where their config is stored without giving them an option. Were OpenSSH to implement XDG, I may want .ssh to remain where it is, but the XDG spec would give me no way to specify that preference. Certainly a lot of tools would expect to find .ssh in $HOME but wouldn’t. And the systemd integrated stuff expects an active user session, which is not always going to be the case. Sorry to say that it’s typical for folks like this to rant about respecting users while completely ignoring whole categories of use cases and insisting on breaking long-standing behavior for their own aesthetic sense of consistency.