The XDG specified directories are not created with the account, they’re created (and recreated if missing) when the user logs in
The XDG specified directories, as described by Jacob, are not created with the account, they’re created (and recreated if missing) when the user logs in. Pointing those user-dirs variables at $HOME is a workaround, but it doesn’t actually disable the functionality; if disabling is what you want, you can change ”enabled=True” to ”enabled=False” in /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf. As the comment in that file above the definition says,
# This controls the behaviour of xdg-user-dirs-update which is run on user login
# You can also have per-user config in ~/.config/user-dirs.conf, or specify
# the XDG_CONFIG_HOME and/or XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to override this