Thanks, @Will_M. I was indeed talking about the settings for a new Finder window (when using just a single Finder window at a time, I’m not bothered by the offsetting that occurs when you open more Finder windows). I usually don’t leave any windows open when restarting Finder or rebooting. So when Finder comes back up, the first window (cmd-n) will always be centered and tiny. I can move that window to where I want it and resize it to my liking, and that will indeed stick for future new Finder windows. But only up until I relaunch Finder. Then it’s back to square one.
I have a workaround. One is the AppleScript in the thread I linked to above. The other would be running an app like FinderMinder (free, kudos to @GraphicMac for pointing it out to me), although that does more than just restore desired window settings. It’s not so much the workaround I’m after but figuring out if what I see is the ‘normal’ behavior everybody else sees (as intended by Apple) or if this is buggy behavior as I previously always assumed.