Oh I‘m fighting the battle for a clean home directory for years. I even use a setup on macOS to set specific environment variables via systemd during login so I can link them into the .config directory.

Only issue with my setup in general is that I can‘t just replicate it for other people. I moved .aws directory in .config/aws and I sometimes forget what the default for most tools is or where I helped the tool out to „find the right path“.

I also make sure when writing scripts/cli tools to use the XDG spec. In rust I use the dirs crate for example. I even go so far to never hardcode it for my own config scripts/files just in case I think about going from ~/.config to ~/.my_configurations or whatever.