That parasitism is also Docker's strength: bring along whatever knowledge you have of your favorite language ecosystem's toolchain; it'll not only apply but it'll likely be largely sufficient.
Build systems like Buck and Bazel are more like Nix in this respect: they take over the responsibilities of soke tools in your language's toolchain (usually high-level build tools, sometimes also dependency managers) so they can impose a certain discipline and yield certain benefits (crucially fine-grained, incremental compilation).
Anyway, Docker doesn't fetch or resolve the dependencies of Python packages. It leaves that to other tools (Nix, apt-get, whatever) and just does you the favor of freezing the result as a binary artifact. Immensely useful, but solves a different problem than the main one here, even if it eases some of the same burdens.
Nix guarantees builds succeed so it doesn't need to cache the output