Interestingly, historically, at first there was only Nix the package manager + language. The NixOS distribution came to be purely as a subsequent experiment, a

Interestingly, historically, at first there was only Nix the package manager + language. The NixOS distribution came to be purely as a subsequent experiment, a bright idea by a single another person (AFAIK), kinda "what if?..." Which then became a runaway success (relatively speaking — not mainstream yet), with more and more people realizing the potential and the benefits. Moreover, in fact the original Nix was also a one-person experiment, a PhD thesis by Eelco Dolstra. I believe there's not that much "pushing" anything, rather the ideas being just inherently awesome and breakthrough, and many people quickly realizing this notion after being exposed to them :)