I recently faced a similar hurdle with Nix, particularly when trying to run a .NET 8 AOT application. What initially seemed like it would be a simple setup spiraled into a plethora of issues, ultimately forcing me to back down. I found myself having to abandon the AOT method in favor of a more straightforward solution. To give credit where it's due, .NET AOT is relatively new and, as far as I know, still has several kinks that need ironing out. Nonetheless, I agree that, at least based on my experience, you need a solid understanding of the ins and outs before you can be reasonably productive using Nix.
.NET AOT really is not designed for deployment, in my experience - for example, the compilation is very hard to do in Nix-land, because a critical part of the compilation is to download a compiler from NuGet at build-time. It's archetypical of the thousand ways that .NET drives me nuts in general.
It's intended for 'cloud-native' deployments, as I understand it, so I concur that it's quite disappointing. The concept of downloading compilers via NuGet doesn't sit well with me either. However, I've observed performance enhancements in applications compiled AOT, and I remain optimistic that future versions of .NET will bring further improvements.
