To those of you reading this: I beg you. Avoid creating files or directories of any kind in your user's $HOME directory in order to store your configuration or data.
My immediate response was pretty much "where the hell else should they put them then?"
What exactly else is the /home dir even for otherwise?
The purpose of home is for user-level persistent files. Giving it access to something else means giving random programs write access to some global part of the file tree, and I'd rather not allow that except when actually necessary. As it is I hate having stuff that manual installs in /opt, or the way too many programs on Ubuntu are configured to require sudo to work.
I'm actually totally on board with more stuff that installs entirely local only, especially if it's from outside the distro's package system. I don't like stuff mangling the global tree with no clear standardized path for removal and uninstallation. At least if it's in /home, I can just delete it myself without even needing to go sudo.
And the purpose of .dotfiles in /home is because it prevents those user configuration files and other such local data from cluttering your directory when doing a plain ls for regular user files.
This article just sounds like a misunderstanding of how the file tree is even supposed to work.