Well, I know that I hate them. And I know a lot of other people that hate them. And I'm pretty suspicious of 'features' that allegedly make life easier for naive users by definitely making life harder for experienced users.

And I guess I would call it a "basic usability tenet" that the computer does what I tell it to. Documents, Music, and Videos folders violate this, because if I do the seemingly-obvious thing of just deleting them, the applications that want to use them will just recreate them unless I edit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. So, if developers really think they need to 'help' their 'average users' by creating these folders by default, they should finish the job and honor my desire to not use them, which I've expressed by deleting the damn things.

Also, if I want to rename them, the system should honor that. E.g. if I rename "Music" to "music", applications should not then go and re-create a "Music" folder.

Or, you know, they could just simplify my life and theirs by not creating these 'special' folders in the first place.

Damn straight. Where does the system get off trying to tell me how I should organize my stuff? Keep system stuff in a folder for system stuff and the rest of the file hierarchy is mine, because it is my goddamned computer. The original Mac got this right and no one else has since.

It's always amazing to me how confident random people on the internet are that they know precisely what the average user wants.

They should not be created by default and left empty.