Thanks for providing some concrete examples and explaining how it works. Sounds like a reasonable setup to automate. I'm actually running NixOS at home on a few hosts (but not on my desktop), so Nix isn't entirely foreign to me, but I haven't (yet?) used it with other distros or for developing as my needs have been simpler. In your case, I probably would have chosen the recommended path.

In my current work project, we use Windows and .NET with some libs and tools. Nothing too complicated, but automating it would be nice. I could probably push for it a bit, but I'm not familiar with automating Windows environments, since I mainly use Linux at home.