This is a good analogy, right down to Git's painful UX. Nix is powerful and difficult to understand. Often you'll find yourself in a spot where either you need to take hours or days to understand some fundamental component, or you can just paste a magic incantaion you found soewhere and move on. Good luck googling, it's almost as if they designed the Nix language to be unsearchable. When you do find an answer, it's often 3 years old and completely obsolete. Definitely recommend having a chat window open with other Nix users while working with it. When starting a meaningful project with Nix, make sure you're not on a deadline.

I like Nix, a lot. But I'd currently recommend it for a pretty narrow type of user/use case. Like Git.