Yeah, Nix “doesn’t only alter environment variables”, hell, the most common way of operation is simply patching/compiling standard linux ELF executables in such

Yeah, Nix “doesn’t only alter environment variables”, hell, the most common way of operation is simply patching/compiling standard linux ELF executables in such a way that they dynamically link to the correct dependency, so instead of just having libc mentioned, there is /nix/store/some-hash-libc/lib/libc there. This one libc is shared across many (most) of the packages you will practically have, so you get the advantages of containers, without any overhead in emulation, nor file size.