So far I feel like I'm making progress. Having started from the masochism of Gentoo followed by the relatively lesser masochism of Arch my feeling is at least these hours of configurating are not being poured into the void but will have a substantially longer payback period. Reinstalling Arch or Gentoo always inevitably involved a large amount of remembering long forgotten config incantations which despite a certain number of git configuration repos for system and home and some scripted installation tended not to avoid a significant amount of tedious unfulfilling grunt work at the bootstrapping console.
Mind you I'm interested in views from those who are further along and feeling the pain. I can well believe that that getting to the first '80% how I want things' configuration might be much easier than the next 10% on the same path.
I'm using unstable, flakes, and home manager as a module in the main configuration.nix.
The language doesn't feel particularly arcane or difficult though so I don't relate to that complaint yet. As others have mentioned. A few fairly standard functional features (recursion, destructuring, first class functions) plus JSON sounds about right.