I agree with you, mostly, but I really think Nix is one of those rare abstractions that is easily worth it: it has the potential to simultaneously solve and uni

I agree with you, mostly, but I really think Nix is one of those rare abstractions that is easily worth it: it has the potential to simultaneously solve and unify a bunch of different issues: reproducable builds, package management (system & language), container creation, system config, and so on. One language across all those domains is great, and the ability to rollback an entire system is amazing. Also: the ability to add your own software, GitHub tarballs, and piles as PHP as first-class citizens (you can cleanly remove them!) isn't emphasized enough. You can keep your wget, build script, db config, and nginx config all in the same file! I think if you weighed the complexity of Nix, and NixOS in particular, against the tools it replaces (or anyway, could potentially replace) it's a no-brainer. I'm a convert.