I think you can get going with little to no knowledge. Setup the system, choose a few cool options and packages, and go rebuild. Simple as that.

The difficulty comes from the advanced topics. Modularizing your setup, writing your own packages, generally going off the beaten path.

I did not do any of that (yet). I will in the future, but I am fine with my low-level setup. One machine, one user. A bit later I moved to Nix Flakes (which is just an additional wrapper file around the previously written config) and added a few overlays.

My trick: I downloaded every single public "NixOS" dotfile repository I could find, and then just used "ripgrep" to find anything I was interested in.

Another cool trick I read is setting up a VM to test a small config and get a feeling for it, and then decide if yo want to proceed.