Every time I see comments like this about nix, it makes me want to write a blog post or something on why nix is not some esoteric wizard level of knowledge.

Linux users will learn 10 different ways to write a config file, but for some reason, nix is seen like it's something incredibly hard. This is probably due to Nix's horrible error messages, but honestly, it's not that hard!

The documentation is actually pretty good, I think the problem is varying quality on topic (nixos configuration is heavily documented. Flakes? not so much). The nix pills start out with a high level overview of the language for example, which seems intimidating to new users. When in reality they don't "have" to understand all of that just to configure the system, say enabling password authentication for SSH.

In closing, I do think nixos makes managing a linux system even easier than normal. It abstracts so much of the setup for multiple programs away from the user. And I think that's a good thing, since you can override packages and modify if needed anyways.