There are multiple reasons for this. One being that it's _my_ $HOME, not some random developers'. I literally had more than 50 different dotfiles and dotfolder

There are multiple reasons for this. One being that it's _my_ $HOME, not some random developers'. I literally had more than 50 different dotfiles and dotfolders in my $HOME at some point. It was a garbage dump and I couldn't even identify the culprit with some of them. Simply disrespectful. Then there's the issue of cleaning up leftovers and stale cache files. It shouldn't take a custom script cleaning up after every special snowflake that decided to use some arbitrarily-named directory in $HOME. Not following the spec also makes backing up vital application state much much harder. In the end, I made my $HOME not writeable so I could instantly find out if some software wants to take a dump. It turns out it's often simply unnecessary as well, the software doesn't even care, just prints an error and continues.