Once upon a time windows had absolute pathing. When you saved, it went in the directory you were in out where you told it.
Some time ago windows went to path relative to user. So now when you save to ‘desktop’ it could be one of several desktop folders. Windows tries to hide this by mapping ‘desktop’ to your user relative desktop, but it does this at the application level rather than in the base O/S. (Or, it does it on extended file system APIs). Some apps handle it, some apps don’t. If you have multiple users on a PC, it’s a mess.
It gets further complicated by things like OneDrive. My mom was surprised a few weeks ago by how much stuff was being saved to the cloud instead of in a local folder, because Windows doesn’t make it particularly obvious when one is in the local Documents, or the OneDrive Documents
