I want to use XDG base directories (#815) and got this suggestion from this post:

We offer facilities like KREW_ROOT env var that lets you customize installation path (where binaries and configs go etc), so that may help to some extent.

I set KREW_ROOT to $HOME/.local/share/krew and moved $HOME/.krew to there.

After that no plugins worked anymore because all files in $KREW_ROOT/bin where use absolute symlinks instead of relative ones. I quickly fixed this by running ln -srf ../store/krew/*/krew kubectl-krew and similar commands for all plugins.

At least on windows I think this should be the default behavior to make the move to XDG directories easier, allow renaming/moving the home directory.