As the saying goes, layers are only added, never removed. The world where people respect XDG is not one that can be achieved anymore.
The trick is to use the XDG Base Dir Spec, only if the old ~/.name location doesn't exist. Old users are happy because it doesn't break compatibility and new users are happy because nobody's dropping 10 sacks of potatoes on their metaphorical doorstep
I don't know what's the situation with desktop linux, may it's better, maybe it's worse, but even on a headless dev server it's already a lost cause. Trying to convince everybody to move to a new standard is a hopeless task, imo, best to move on.
And in my opinion .ssh and .gnupg are okay since in some contexts, the "XDG variables" haven't been initialized in certain circumstances when using those utilities.
But yeah, I'll have to look into those - maybe there is something I can do to fix that