Your advice re. Windows is also bad, for example, for a lot of x-platform tools I care more about x-platform consistency and would set the env var to the same ~/.config, e.g., it's much easier to do backup, and I don't care that there is some OS standard (which aren't great to be followed blindly)
But even for non x-platform apps that Windows AppData defaults are a dumping ground for app data (not configs) I don't care about and don't need to backup or anything , so if there is an option to put some configs that are more important in a different folder, that's better