My question is: Does anyone know if there was a single news article, blog, youtube video, influencer that took the project that's been around for a decade+ to gain so much mindshare? Or was it just an organic thing brought on by the containerization stuff?
Sudden increases like this also often comes with a bit of a counter wave. See the "RIIR" jokes for example. I can definitely understand those feelings. It is annoying when something is brough up constantly and talked about as a panacea to everything. Nix will (and already have had) this quite a bit. Especially since nix probably deserves criticisms more than most. Even with flakes it is still very hard to understand and can limit the amount of people able to make changes to the build pipeline. To these critics I can just say that I understand and that it is perfectly fine to not switch to nix. We are just trying to find solutions to problems we see and have had in our projects, they might not be good solutions problems existing in yours.
As for why people have started adopting Nix/NixOS at an increasing rate, I think a lot of ut boils down to the maturity of nixpkgs. It's very quick to just get going.