I developed a utility for my own use and found an answer to your question.

When the program starts up, it needs to know what its configuration is. This is not stored in the code. So it has to find its configuration data somewhere. Ideally, you'd let the user configure where they want the config file. But then the program has to read the config file to find out where the config file is, and it doesn't know where to look.

(So it seems like you pretty much have to put config data in the same place on every computer, or use environment variables.)

If you don't know about the XDG Specification in the article (I didn't), a $HOME/.myconfig file is by far the simplest and most robust solution.

In order to have per user settings you have to have one dir per user. For practical purposes and security it ought to be somewhere only user has access it. Optionally it would be nice if you could back up all user settings and files in one place.

The logical conclusion is that it ought to live somewhere in home which meets the above criteria. Its obviously cleaner to store data in $XDG_* but keep in mind that some of the apps creating said files are actually older than linux and certainly older than such standards.

From dev and user perspective it would be nice to have them updated to follow the standard but in practice the practical effect is nil so lots of stuff doesn't bother.

It is safe. Everybody does it, there is .gitconfig, .ssh etc so one more would not hurt.

Until there is 500 dotfiles, some long forgotten.

In a way a users settings are ‘personal files’, so it can be argued they go in home.

It’s a convenient place to store user data that works across platforms.