I started using nix. It’s difficult and search results are not often helpful.
I've seen countless people trying a new technology/tool, and overselling it as 'amazing' and super easy.
Seeing a post like yours helps to keep the discussion grounded in reality, with tools that looks nice on paper but have practical downsides as well.
Finding your sea legs is rough, and IME people who completely deny this are few and far between. The reward is a pretty impressive lever.
I set up a shell.nix file on my projects, and together with direnv the environment switches with the right dependencies for each project.
Shameless plug, I wrote about this recently on medium: https://link.medium.com/cYkKMtdHRkb
Parts of it are getting easier, and it has an exceptionally smart and helpful community. But it's not smooth and pretty and easy to pick up like Homebrew is. (And that does suck)
I found it much more helpful to find people's own Nix setups and learn from them, by the way. Mine is at https://github.com/Smaug123/nix-dotfiles - like all such things, it's a WIP, and I'm definitely still a noob, but bits of it may be able to help.