Nix documentation is such a clusterfuck. You have to basically forage some kind of "most up2date understanding" of basic best practices from random ass blogposts / digging into other people's configs. This is a major red flag.
The Nix developers should really really take a look at Cargo/Go and learn from developer-friendly tools. The fact that nix is hosted on nixos.org which seems to be completely unrelated to nix shows that they do not understand (yet) how to market their tool, and today every project/company is a media company. You need to learn how to sell your product, and how to improve the dev experience.
In my opinion, writing derivations in Guile Scheme, using Guix[0], is a breath of fresh air[1]. If only the ecosystem were as large as Nix's...
This is what I gathered too. Though I found people on Discord more helpful than the blog posts since things tend not to work as written in those posts anyway.