> When you inevitably find software that isn't in nix (or are packaging your own software), be prepared to take a quantum leap in complexity as you now need to fully understand the nix language and its concepts like derivations. This isn't necessarily hard but it is not documented well at all, and there are factions in nix at odds with each other (flakes vs. nix-env) which make learning it even more confusing.
Exactly this was why I am so hesitant to switch to nix. I tried to dig into the details of nix, language, derivation and whatnot, but documentations and community discussions are, in my experience pretty segregated that left me confused, and I eventually went back to arch.