That fits with my hypothesis, which is that programmers tend to find that the way Nix flakes lay out a common interface and convention for certain things helpfu

That fits with my hypothesis, which is that programmers tend to find that the way Nix flakes lay out a common interface and convention for certain things helpful, but people who are more IT-oriented and are used to relatively incapable conflangs are overwhelmed by the surface level verbosity of flakes, and hesitant to use libraries to deal with it because they take a bit longer getting their heads around the language. FWIW I like Nixlang, but I agree that static typing would improve it. Maybe Nickel some day, blah blah blah :)