I was agreeing with you... but okay. The time period you specified is dominated by the largely uncontested ascendancy of the liberal international order, aka the West.
The XDG Base Directory Specification is based on the following concepts:
There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific data files should be written. This directory is defined by the environment variable $XDG_DATA_HOME.
There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific configuration files should be written. This directory is defined by the environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific state data should be written. This directory is defined by the environment variable $XDG_STATE_HOME.
There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific executable files may be written.
There is a set of preference ordered base directories relative to which data files should be searched. This set of directories is defined by the environment variable $XDG_DATA_DIRS.
There is a set of preference ordered base directories relative to which configuration files should be searched. This set of directories is defined by the environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS.
There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific non-essential (cached) data should be written. This directory is defined by the environment variable $XDG_CACHE_HOME.
There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific runtime files and other file objects should be placed. This directory is defined by the environment variable $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
I mean... not only is it not very concerning, I barely noticed. If not for news about it here on fediverse, I might not have known. I guess I dont visit the corpo internet all that much.
I was agreeing with you... but okay. The time period you specified is dominated by the largely uncontested ascendancy of the liberal international order, aka the West.