When I moved from BeOS after they went belly up (F) I took a few concepts with me, not the least of which is ~/config and ~/config/bin the latter of which is added to $path. Highly recommend it as a place to home scripts and small compiled programs that don't need to be system-wide.
Any reason why yould have it in .bash_local over .bashrc? I use zsh but even when I used bash or fish, I'd add to my $PATH via .bashrc and config.fish respectively.
Just to simplify things when I use lots of Linux distros that create different default .bashrc files. Makes it easier to distribute via ansible this way. No other reason really.