I rage-quit Gentoo the first time (2002ish?) for Debian when stable portage got a broken version of gcc, making it very hard to recover. The second Gentoo was by far the longest, maybe 2003 through 2018? I'm 4 years into NixOS now and very happy with it. I actually run into issues with switching to new release channels almost as often as I did the few times I experimented with Ubuntu, but it's just so much easier to work around these issues by mixing-and-matching packages from different channels[1] that it just doesn't bother me.
It also got me to love systemd. Configuring systemd units (especially timers!) with nix is so much more ergonomic than the bare files that I pity anyone who has to do it by hand.
1: 95% of the time it's already fixed in unstable, the other 5% of the time I pull in the version from the previous release channel.