Things like bashrc and vimrc have been "standard" for decades; that's not a "non-standard configuration", it's what everyone uses today. And Neovim only supports ~/.config/nvim/init.vim judging from the manpage(?) If it doesn't then this only underscores my point that all of this is apt to lead to confusion.

Either way, it had a clean break from Vim and didn't have to deal with people who have been using Neovim for decades (lots of things are different compared to Vim and it's not intended to be compatible in the first place).