Abandon hope.

I just treat ~ as a system-owned configuration area, and put my actual files (documents, photos, etc.) in a completely different hierarchy under /.

You could write a kernel module, then, that just hides certain symlinks from you (which is effectively what this module is).

On Windows this was always easier because, for some reason, most everyone respected %appdata% compared to XDG_CONFIG_HOME, but also because hidden files wasn’t just a naming convention but an actual separate metadata flag.

That ship has sailed 30 years ago.