It doesn't help that the Nix documentation used to be one of the worst I have ever encountered while Arch and Gentoo have some of the most comprehensive and well written Wikis.
Did it significantly improve in the past two years?
I feel like I can pretty concretely answer with “no”.
The docs are hard to read and don’t cover content well, and the ecosystem split that flakes brought have made it more complicated than ever for a new user to jump in today.
There’s plenty of user generated content out there. Sometimes it can fill in a gap, but most of the time I find that I have to just figure it out myself.
Nix is a cool system overall but the learning curve still seems needlessly steep.
https://determinate.systems seems to be doing good work for the nix community though. Shout out to them for sure.
There has been more blog posts and YouTube learning material on NixOS very recently.
I don't know what happens when you dig deeper than those.
It does require a lot of tinkering.