Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So it's OK to hide the mess, by throwing everything from the living room into the closet, I guess? Yes? This is literally how every human in the world does it. You put your things, according to catrgories, into their respective room/cabinet. If somebody asks you where your sweaters are, you don't say "just search the ground", you say " in the closet". Same thing here. You don't have to guess where files are, you kn…
My counterpoint was merely that ~/. hid things, unless you did weird things. Like explicitly ask to see all hidden things. Having a file manager set to see all dotfiles by default, is like ripping all the doors off your closets.
~/.programname is an unorganized mess, where someone stuff their dirty laundry, their trash, their food and their passport into the same closet. It doesn't matter if the closet is open or not, nobody but the mentally ill hoarder who created the mess can navigate it.
~/.(local|share|cache) means people put their food in the fridge, their trash into the bin and their sensitive documents in a fire proof safe. Which means other people can take care of basic tasks like taking out the trash and creating backups of their sensitive documents.