Totally valid, and the Unix-style filesystem sprawl is definitely a pain sometimes. On the other hand, when an application does follow standards, you always kno

Totally valid, and the Unix-style filesystem sprawl is definitely a pain sometimes. On the other hand, when an application does follow standards, you always know where something is, and just by looking at the name of the directory you know what's in there. The other thing that's nice about the XDG standard is that it generally encourages developers to split binary state data, configuration, etc. even if you do it all within one folder, that's better (for the user) than jumbling it altogether in one big SQLite database or whatever. It is a note that a lot of applications and even package managers are kind of moving back to the model you describe. For example Homebrew installs each package into its own prefix and symlinks into /opt/homebrew/bin,lib,etc... I still don't like hard coding the MYAPP_HOME dir in ~/.myapp and prefer an environment variable to configure it. Personally I put all such folders into ~/.local/opt/$MYAPP if possible.