It's a great idea. But on non-native Docker, like OSX, it's simply too slow. Even when it's acceptable speeds, I find my computer running at 100% CPU usage with the fan out of control.

Nix is a similar idea and makes the environmental identical for all developers. Makes on-boarding trivial. And speeds are "native" on all platform.

As a nice side effect: it normalizes all tools like sed, grep and find.

With that said, as a consumer of a Nix setup, it's about as easy if not an easier experience than using Docker[1].

But properly learning to create your own Nix packages, etc, involves a very, very steep learning curve. Far higher than learning the basics of a Dockerfile.

[1] Catalina issues notwithstanding, though there is a 4 command solution now: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925