Nix, and NixOS, are designed for those of us who have to clean 10,000 proverbial litter boxes every day. I use Nix fairly extensively at work; I use it very little at home, where I don't need to worry about what dependency someone took on a specific version of Python five years ago, etc.
It's like k8s, imo - it solves some real problems at scale but is rarely going to be a good idea for individual users.
It's also nice in the small. At home I like using datasette to search SQLite databases. One day it decided to stop working. I tried reinstalling it with pipx, didn't work either. nix-shell -p datasette, it works.
It's like k8s, imo - it solves some real problems at scale but is rarely going to be a good idea for individual users.