Exact same experience here. Been fiddling with nixos for quite a while, but never got comfortable with .nix or flakes. The base concepts keep escaping my mind, I have to revisit every time I have to configure something new and I just got tired. Issues are difficult to debug and you have to go through very specific commands and a hellish filesystem to understand what's going wrong. I love the concept, but I feel like it just gets too much in my way.