AFAICT, you can get much of the benefit in a polished package without the pain by using Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea for the OS and then creating dev sandboxes using either Fedora's toolbox or by harnessing the incredible Nix ecosystem using JetPack's devbox.
I haven't tried that combination. I'm currently using NixOS and loving part of it, but am bleeding on the sharp edges.
I'm currently using Fedora Kinoite with a few toolboxes (one for Rust, one for Node, etc). While not as fancy as a full Nix setup, it's an incredibly robust system that's modern and easy to maintain. A+ would recommend.
I haven't tried that combination. I'm currently using NixOS and loving part of it, but am bleeding on the sharp edges.