I have often wished there was a way to set certain dotfiles to be unhidden, without hiding everything. It could be done with extended attributes (which can already be used to hide a non dot file, this would just be the reverse).

I don't think this would be an overly severe UNIX violation? Dot files would still be hidden by default, the extended attribute would just be an override.

Yeah this is a poor adaptation of unix software to macOS. Those tools ought to have their config files either moved to or symlinked into ~/Library/Preferences with non-dot-prefixed names in order to make sense on the Mac. It's a shame even Apple's ports don't do this.

In general, end users don’t even have a .vimrc, .bashrc, etc. If you even know these things exist, you’re an exception.

There is no GUI version of Vim or Bash provided. They are expected to be used via the command line, where hidden files can be seen just as they can on any other Unix.

What fraction of Mac users do you think have every used vim or bash, let alone even opened Terminal.app? Or even know that it exists?

As a Mac user who uses command prompts all day every day, I don't open Terminal.app.

Well, they switched to zsh, but yeah.

True. Most users will have a .emacs file.