Until the tooling introduces a breaking change or new cooler way to do things appear and people stop supporting the old way because "everyone switched anyway". Been there, done that.
For those not familiar:
Nix tooling introduced flakes. The community generally likes this feature since it provides a couple of significant improvements on how nix gets used.
There was a breaking change between 2.3 and 2.4 for even the non-flake code; but, that was partly because 2.4 was a huge release. (2.3 released in 2019/09; 2.4 in 2021/11). Releases since then have been smaller and more frequent.
Most of the time the deprecations require no action on my part, I simply rather keep things tidy and make the warnings go away.
> In a way, it’s reassuring to see that niche Linux distributions have changed so little in the decade since I last used one.
You are misunderstanding what I am saying. The situation is very different. There are still Linux/Wayland/NVidia/Whatever issues, but configuring NixOS is not among them.
Here to confirm that you can usually ignore those warnings for a year or more, hahaha.
Yeah, if any of that is even remotely true then something is horribly wrong with your system.