It's ridiculously hard to get started. The online resources are simply inadequate: incorrect and/or out-of-date information is basically equally common as useful information. There isn't a good book you can get on Amazon. The "Learn" boards thing is full of "you're doing it wrong" bullshit. The Discord is so-so at best for getting help.
For me personally it was somewhere between 1-3 months of being frustrated basically every day and I still want to throw things sometimes. It's basically clone `nixpkgs`, figure out how to get the REPL going, painstakingly reading the code of the stuff that does work, and pain.
It says absolutely nothing about how smart/capable/motivated/senior someone is that a week or two in it's like "fuck this".
The payoff is outrageous, but the barrier to entry is nowhere near something that can be called "acceptable", let alone "batteries included". I completely understand why a lot of people are all-but-hostile to it.
I would budget a minimum of a highly frustrating month working with it every day to start to having the lightbulb moments, and frankly your use case needs to be pretty extreme in one way or another for that to be worth it. A lot of people don't have a friggin month to screw around with a fairly niche infrastructure if what they're doing now works for them.
I really, really hope that at some point someone gets serious about making this fairly magical thing even remotely learnable, but right now it's a fucking mess.