Following the standard does not require you don't have a single folder, it can all be changed with 4 simple environment variables. If you want to have everything dumped horrendously in your home folder nothing is saying you can't, it just wouldn't be the default, because it's simply not an orderly way to organize the files.

The biggest problem is programs that don't even let you change where they store the stuff, so even if you're okay with the default not being XDG you dont even have the option to make it respect XDG base directory specification.