What I do is probably more similar to you than you realize. I'm not
categorically placing all images in ~/Pictures, rather I'm using that directory primarily for pictures that I've taken. Each photo taking session gets its own sub-directory with the ISO 8601 date followed by a description of the event. This is extremely convenient because software I use (like raw image developers) automatically knows to look in ~/Pictures and I can access my files right away.
Likewise, I'm not using ~/Documents just for stuff with an .odt or .pdf extension. Rather, any sort of human-readable text based file goes there. I have some markdown files that have embedded images, and of course the .png or .svg files exist alongside them in the relevant directories.
~/Music is probably the best example of why the default XDG approach makes sense. You can place everything in an Artist/Album hierarchy, and most music software is written to automatically pick up and scan these directories to keep their internal libraries in sync. There's no fuss.
I don't limit myself to just the XDG directories when there's not a close fit; i also have a ~/Projects for various things I've made and ~/Programs for statically built programs that can't be installed, and so on.
Basically, I've found that the XDG approach does a pretty good job of splitting up files by purpose, allowing you to compartmentalize by avoiding having too many directories at the top level of the hierarchy.