That seems to be a consequence of what IMO is an unfortunately common bad design: having user-controlled data like usernames as the first path component (without a prefix like ~). There are many things which are expected to be found at the root of the path (the classic example being robots.txt, but there's also favicon.ico, .well-known, and probably others; I vaguely recall that IIRC Flash used a fixed filename in the root for cross-domain access control), and you never know when a new one will be invented by someone (though .well-known is supposed to contain the spread of these "magic" names).
