Honestly it's a mess

same, I just delete all these dirs and use ~/downloads for everything. If I need a file for more than a couple of hours, it goes somewhere it makes sense, not to a generic dumpster like "Documents".

The XDG Base Directory Specification is a set of guidelines to tell application developers where they should store their application's config files, cache, etc.

There are many applications that don't follow the guidelines and put their files in a hidden folder directly in your home directory, which is what the guidelines are trying to combat.

It's used to store configuration files for various applications so they don't clutter up your home directory. For example, you can put your Emacs config files in ~/.config/emacs instead of ~/.emacs.d. Not every program supports it though.

Would that not be under ~/Videos?