Nah I’ve been on macports for years now. No problems; the community is very active, just follow the mailing lists etc

I got sick of Homebrew after a while and tried switching to MacPorts, but it feels like an endless uphill battle when so many packages only offer source and Homebrew distributions.

There are dozens of us!

I mostly just use Nix, but I also have pkgsrc, MacPorts, and (kinda) Homebrew installed on my Mac.

The only ones with any CLI tools installed, though, are Nix and pkgsrc.

You are not. I've been using MacPorts for 15+ years at this point. Started with fink and then made the switch around the days of Snow Leopard. I'm also a BSD user, so no surprise there. I enjoy being able to compile ports with non-standard variants (e.g., non-free codecs in ffmpeg, removing un-needed interpreters from packages, etc.)

I keep ports around for things like lilypond (which I use for quasi-professional score engraving) and some other packages that homebrew is weird on. The removal of options a few years back still stinks for be

I'm still sour that homebrew gained so many user when it was started by basically FUD-ing Macports and arguing that their ability to reuse the existing toolchain of OSX with the superior choice while Macports pointed out that homebrew design was flawed.

Fast forward to now, Homebrew actually had to make all the changes Macports pointed out as flawed design decisions because, well, they were but enjoy more users and has tainted Macports reputation. It's very much a case of the inferior product winning as far as I'm concerned. I know that most of the original team is not there anymore but I still mostly refuse to use it.

honebrew works too :)