Noob Here - Just starting with KiCad - bom problems - possibly due to my ignorance

KiCad is highly flexible in this regard.
You don’t really need to think about where you place your libs. The only thing needed is to give kicad a pointer to it.

I wrote a detailed tutorial for footprint libs regarding exactly this topic. (Symbol lib behave nearly the same in version 5) How can i install a specific version of the footprint library?