But I do agree we need to deal with the language-based packaging situation much better. It's a long-standing project of mine to fix that.
Speaking of half-assed kludges, NixOS itself is a held together by duct tape of scripts patching shebangs and whatnot.
The deployed system is very easy to reason about, which I greatly appreciate with my laptop and production environments.
(In addition to trying to support the language-based ecosystems better, I also want to reduce the things we do in bash. I think those are complimentary goals, too.)