When you install a fresh Apache installation (I used a version with PHP 7.3) you get my.ini twice. It can be found both in the mysql/data and the mysql/bin directories. The version in mysql/bin looks ok. The version in mysql/data is strange. It contains only:
[mysqld] datadir=c:/xampp/mysql/data [client]
It even says c:\xampp when you installed it in a different directory.