It's aggravating and kept me away from it for a while too. Try out small isolated parts of it like nix-shell and the flakes version of it nix develop. You can

It's aggravating and kept me away from it for a while too. Try out small isolated parts of it like nix-shell and the flakes version of it nix develop. You can play with that stuff without having to dive in and commit moving all your existing home and other environments to it. Basically just get a little sandbox going to experiment with until you're more confident in doing more with it (or you might find you don't need it and didn't waste much effort/time).