Who said it’s a different instance?! Renaming a directory structure doesn’t have side effects like this in pretty much any other infra stuff. It’s like nc or curl deciding what Server to connect to based on the current directory name. Whacky.
It's a great convention over configuration decision (that you can overwrite with -p) that trivially gives solution to multi-tenancy problem, similarly you'll run into problems when renaming $HOME to something else; for curl it's more like being surprised that it uses different source ip address and gives different result when called from host in China than in Europe.
