How did the ~/.local/bin thing start? How widespread is it?

I find more and more tools that put executables into ~/.local/bin. I am old and for me ~/bin is the place in my $HOME for executables. Where did this crazy new fashion originate? Why are people doing this? How widespread is it? Is it formalized anywhere? It is not in the XDG directory specification. There is a related question: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/316765/which-distributions-have-home-local-bin-in-path A comment to another question refert to https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370 which had it back in 2008 already: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/240037/why-did-this-program-install-into-local-bin-thats-the-first-time-i-have-s