Reading back, my comment sounds snarky, but I was genuinely trying to be helpful.

Like what pemptago was describing, instead of symlinking your directories to /home/username/username, you could simply update that file and achieve the same effect, but in a more “official” way that may prove more robust.

Are you aware of the ‘xdg-user-dirs-update’ command that allows you to edit the ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs config file?