Personally I think of Nix mainly as analogous to "the part of Docker which concerns itself with producing the OCI artefact", but in a much less cursed way than

Personally I think of Nix mainly as analogous to "the part of Docker which concerns itself with producing the OCI artefact", but in a much less cursed way than via Dockerfile and `docker build`. (`docker build` is inherently cursed by design; `nix build` is cursed only through incidental facts about Nix, and it would be possible in principle to write a non-cursed frontend for it.)