I think one of the reasons it feels like this is with Nix, the guts of what people are setting up are all exposed, right there in robust code. You see what's go

I think one of the reasons it feels like this is with Nix, the guts of what people are setting up are all exposed, right there in robust code. You see what's going in to the sausage. In comparison, I've worked in projects which distribute their components as .deb packages, and the difference is night and day, the latter being a nightmare of laborious manual steps and funny tools. To a user of a .deb file this is all opaque, but let me assure you the complexity is most certainly there in spades.