On Windows this was always easier because, for some reason, most everyone respected %appdata% compared to XDG_CONFIG_HOME, but also because hidden files wasn’t just a naming convention but an actual separate metadata flag.

Always... Except for the decades before this became common. Never a bloated C: root directory. Microsoft even had games store stuff in My Documents\Games at one point. My Documents was a user dir that saw a lot of abuse over the years.