I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
The exceptions should only apply for cases where XDG is not available. In any other case, the appropriate XDG directoy configured by the user should be used first.