Before getting a new MacBook, I was using MacPorts since Homebrew had several problems, including what the GP mentioned. For over a year now, I have used home-manager with Nix. Nixpkgs has the "important" subset of GUI programs that I use. Major exception to this is OrbStack, but there is a homebrew-to-nix converter that I use to handle that.

I briefly experimented with nix-darwin, but concluded that it was overkill for my needs. Home Manager also has the benefit of not being Mac-specific (so plenty of questions and examples exist online).

Most importantly, I no longer have to mentally prepare myself when updating Mac OS. If I recall correctly, both MacPorts and Homebrew require the user to re-install all installed packages after a major version update, but this problem doesn't really exist on Nix. It's also nice being able to store flakes in a Git repository and effortlessly rollback changes or replicate a whole development environment across several machines.