You're right -- but it's even worse DX to have to check a ton of different files, parse the outdated english documentation, guess, ask people, and hope that dep

You're right -- but it's even worse DX to have to check a ton of different files, parse the outdated english documentation, guess, ask people, and hope that deps were frozen. Especially for old, mostly abandoned projects. I've started using direnv to switch node versions for projects, based on already-existing CI configuration files, and it's fantastic. Having a full, working, stable development environment that can be shared among the team (amd future teams doing software archaeology when something breaks!) is my holy grail. I'm really excited about the future of nix. But you're right that at the end of the day, devs should retain control. I think having clear, machine readable instructions for how to set up the environment enables that control. Forcing them to use the blessed config is not necessary. HAVING the config lets you know what you need to set up, your own way. The only place such strict control needs to happen is in CI/CD, which just falls out of having the dev setup done.