Far more likely reason for ~/.profile not being loaded if you’re an Xfce user is this change to LightDM. Previously it was loading ~/.profile and other files
for file in "/etc/profile" "$HOME/.profile" "/etc/xprofile" "$HOME/.xprofile"; do
if [ -f "$file" ]; then
echo "Loading profile from $file";
. "$file"
fi
done
Now it doesn’t do that, and neither bash or zsh will load ~/.profile by default (bash will load it only if there is no ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login, or if it’s launched with name sh or with --posix option).
So yes, if you were relying on previous LightDM behaviour and still need ~/.profile to be sourced then you now have to do that from either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zprofile as appropriate for your chosen shell.