I've used NixOS at home since like 2016. While I haven't used it professionally or for "serious" enthusiast deployments, I don't think I can claim to be a drive-by user. I still insist on using nix-env because it's what all the first-party manuals tell me to do and I don't want to get into a situation where I am experiencing huge pain and the first-party people all tell me "well, that's on you for doing things in a different way".
At least my impression from a while ago is that the actual documentation Nix has seems to be aimed at "drive-by" or at least casusal/entry-level users, and to get the deeper insights that make the whole thing enjoyable, you need to give up on the documentation and just absorb all the details from github discussions, through extensive trial&error, etc.
Yeah people say the docs are unapproachable, but I agree the docs are too much "here is how to do a bunch of random things" and not enough systematically describing what Nix is.
At least my impression from a while ago is that the actual documentation Nix has seems to be aimed at "drive-by" or at least casusal/entry-level users, and to get the deeper insights that make the whole thing enjoyable, you need to give up on the documentation and just absorb all the details from github discussions, through extensive trial&error, etc.