Though, on the other hand, the comment says a new CLI is close to release, so I guess people are trying to improve things.
I don't want to be too critical, I love Nix. But the experimental new UI was already in development (and available) when I started using Nix in 2018. It has also changed quite a lot recently and is now very strongly tied to flakes. However, the flakes RFC was withdrawn [1]. Given that flakes are a large change, I'd expect (but maybe I am wrong) that there will be a new RFC.
At any rate, I would be surprised if the new CLI with flakes are close to release.
I don't want to be too critical, I love Nix. But the experimental new UI was already in development (and available) when I started using Nix in 2018. It has also changed quite a lot recently and is now very strongly tied to flakes. However, the flakes RFC was withdrawn [1]. Given that flakes are a large change, I'd expect (but maybe I am wrong) that there will be a new RFC.
At any rate, I would be surprised if the new CLI with flakes are close to release.
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/49