I don't have strong feelings one way or the other, the files are hidden so out of sight out of mind for me.

I don't disagree that it would be cleaner if things were more organized, but I definitely prefer something more like that the person you replied to said, ie "~/.xdg/foo/{config,share,state,cache}"

The only XDG folders that seem reasonable to me are .local/share/fonts and .local/share/applications, and I think both of those are still just conventions, not actually described in any spec.