Until and unless you're on a system which doesn't or can't have nix (RAM size preventing evaluation, $job policy, ...) I really appreciate and use nixpkgs+nix-

Until and unless you're on a system which doesn't or can't have nix (RAM size preventing evaluation, $job policy, ...) I really appreciate and use nixpkgs+nix-darwin as well as NixOS and flakes and per-project nix-shell/nix develop through and through; even then, Home Manager is a bridge too far for me. One of the features of my dotfiles setup is that it has zero dependencies (beyond a POSIX shell).