I've used this set up for 3 or 4 years now and love it. I used to hit bottlenecks having to edit some nix files once or twice a month and forgetting the language but LLMs dramatically reduce that barrier.

I wonder how common this set-up is, but it's what I settled on as well (my flake contains 8 other NixOS hosts with common home-manager config).

Sometimes I wish I could control more things using nix-darwin but then I remember I like mostly defaults on System Settings.

I tried nix-darwin (with plenty of LLM assistance) but struggled to get it to work in the way I wanted. I couldn’t get it to manage my dock, and it was fiddly bootstrapping my two main users from an admin user.