The programming languages developers use have surprises and inconsistencies like this when you compare between them. It seems awfully pessimistic to think Nix is too hard to use for things like that. (Although I never really understood people who detested Python's whitespace significance, either).

I think it's also a bit impractical. I'd be surprised if anyone refused to use Terraform because they didn't like HCL. (Well, these days there's Pulumi). -- I think Nix's boon to managing packages makes it worth the minor unfamiliarity of a very simple programming language.