It's the rationale behind the XDG directories, nonetheless. The "ideal" setup is to have ~/.config on the remote NFS server, ~/.local on the local workstation,

It's the rationale behind the XDG directories, nonetheless. The "ideal" setup is to have ~/.config on the remote NFS server, ~/.local on the local workstation, and ~/.cache on the local workstation (either disk or tmpfs). And yeah, poor implementation means that ~/.local not roaming around with you just makes things worse, despite the obvious name and intention. Developers almost never know when to properly implement it. XDG is just overcomplicated nonsense. The only part I like is ~/.cache. I don't buy for one bit the "clutter" argument about having some dotfiles (and no, setting $XDG_CONFIG_DIR=$HOME and $XDG_DATA_HOME=$HOME does not solve it; first, conflicts; second, files won't be prefixed with a dot).