Same. I can't be the only one who feels that Nix is doing the right thing the wrong way. The right thing being reproducible, declarative, composable environments; the wrong thing being its language and tooling. Too often I feel like serious Nix users spend a distressing amount of time manually doing package manager tasks, so the way forward is to stop doing exactly that. Going back to imperative composition is a step backward that will never help people free up time away from package management.

FWIW I am starting to use home manager on my new macOS workstation, and I haven't had to dig too deep into Nix, nixpkgs, or NixOS.

I might hit limits soon as I rice my neovim install.

Make sure to have a look at nixvim: https://github.com/nix-community/nixvim

The language is just JSON with functions. It's actually so nice to write configurations in that I wish it was more easier to use as a standalone thing.

I wish guix was a little more mainstream.