[tetris11]

It usually doesn't, and it's mostly a good standards recommendation that even the most GPL of GPL codebases doesn't always follow (looking at you, emacs).

[chimprich]

Emacs has respected $XDG_CONFIG_HOME for a while now. There are worse offenders (e.g. not likely to see the end of .mozilla any time soon).

[j16sdiz]

GNU emacs was created at 1984. XDG Base Directory spec was started around 2003..

[Zambyte]

Also Emacs will reapect files being placed in XDG directories, it just doesn't put them there...