I don’t understand how this is getting approved.

Because you get promoted for changing things, not for keeping things the same. Almost every change like this is motivated by someone trying to get promoted.

Yeah but the main issue is that I don’t want there to be a Downloads directory in my home.

Even worse, many components will ignore the XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR var so even if you manually change it to $HOME/downloads (lower-case) it will often break things.