The problem with Nix is that it's a single monolithic package archive. Every conceivable package must go somewhere in the nixpkgs tree, and is expected to be as

The problem with Nix is that it's a single monolithic package archive. Every conceivable package must go somewhere in the nixpkgs tree, and is expected to be as vanilla as possible. On top of that, there is the all-packages.nix global namespace, which implicitly urges everyone to use the same dependency versions; but in practice just results in a mess of redundant names like package_version.1.12_x-feature-enabled... The move toward flakes only replaces this problem with intentional fragmentation. Even so, flakes will probably end up being the best option if it ever gets coherent documentation.