[happens]

I daily drive NixOS, and while I initially had the same experience I've settled on some workflows that basically allow me to run anything with minimal maintenance.

I think it's a problem that many tutorials and example configs you find online are very verbose and propose complex patterns, when you don't really need that much for it to be useful. There is still a learning curve, but you don't need to write a modularized configuration framework if you just want some machines with synced config and apps.

I've written about my workflow here [1], but haven't published it anywhere yet. Not sure how useful this is to other people.

[1] https://happens.lol/blog/how-to-nixos-insane/