> Has anyone else come up with a sane Nix strategy to avoid the overhead?

Didn’t need to use it for a long time now, because nowadays almost everything is packaged, but there is steam-run CLI app that will run the specified executable in a “standard-like” environment. It still doesn’t support everything, but could come in handy.

In the very early days I also just had a debian file system laying around and I machinectl-d into it (very lightweight virtual machines)