Nix is difficult, but there are advantages to it. A couple of comparisons are similar: with Terraform (or CloudFormation etc.), you put in a lot of effort up f

Nix is difficult, but there are advantages to it. A couple of comparisons are similar: with Terraform (or CloudFormation etc.), you put in a lot of effort up front in order to reduce maintenance effort later. You could manually go through and setup a VM instance or two; but with Terraform, you have a declaration in code of what the system should be. I think another comparison is: Vim or Emacs are more difficult to use compared to using VSCode. In terms of DX, there are advantages to Emacs over VSCode. If modal editing seems to make sense, it's probably worth looking at vim. But, if you just want to get the job done right now and not fuss about learning an unfamiliar tool, VSCode is surely a better choice.