After daily driving NixOS and the Nix pm for almost three years, it feels like it’ll be simplified by entities external to the project. It’s still in that academic phase (don’t do this/that) and needs software engineering asap.
That usually involves reducing boilerplate ruthlessly while generalizing/capturing fundamental uses cases (setting implicit best current practices). It’s reminiscent of lxc just before docker arrived for the masses.
btw this blog is served to you by NixOS :-)