Like you, I also don't produce anything "worthy of its own folder." Plus, I tend to not archive older versions of the same program. Unless there's a good reason to, I only save the up to date version. I suppose people behave with their computer files the same way they are with everything else in their lives. Both my wife and I are the opposite of hoarders. If we don't need stuff, we either give it to charity or toss, depending. Always try to keep things from piling up, over time.
With QB64, my scheme is to copy the qb64 folder (latest development build) as a subfolder of my MyPrograms folder. All my .bas and .ini files are in the MyPrograms main folder. Whenever a new version of qb64 comes out, I simply delete the old qb64 subfolder, along with all of the .exe files of all of the programs I compiled with the previous version, copy in the new qb64 folder, and then go from there. Anything I need to run gets recompiled with the new qb64. That automatically keeps the list of .exe files to a minimum.
Makes for a largish MyPrograms folder, but I'm most likely not the software geek that many others on this list are. So it remains manageable. The name of each program explains what it does. I often have different variants of the same tool, to apply to different projects, so the project becomes part of the filename, easily sorted that way.