> I have recently adopted Nix and NixOS and it's been truly fantastic. It does have a really harsh learning curve though. Big downsides, but for me the upsides are so huge that it's worth it.

It's huge. I tried learning and exploring Nix Darwin. Went through at least half a dozen blog posts with "step by step" instructions. All different. All had some fatal error at some point even on a new install of macOS that was from moderate to impossible to find coherent help on.