But the Nix language itself is really quite annoying. I mean, I've more or less gotten used to its annoyances, and I do think that some of the DSLs it has are excellent (I really like the Nginx and systemd configuration stuff, for example), and a lot of the configs are just `services.myservice.enable = true` which is fine, but a lot of the time I'm kind of confused about what syntax is allowed and how loops work and the like. It's not horrible or anything, just a bit annoying because I'll occasionally have to do a nixos-rebuild like three or four times because I messed up some subtle syntax, and it's especially annoying if I have to go dig at the root Nix package to find out what I did wrong [1].
I think decentralizing stuff in the form of flakes might be able to help with this, if for no other reason the area in which you'd be forced to look for configuration stuff could be reduced, but I do think NixOS would benefit from some rearchitecture.
[1] Which happened yesterday with an ethernet card configuration: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.05/nixos/modu...
that + learning the like 5 or so idioms that pervade nixpkgs and you can use Nix quite successfully imo.
When a build fails, I use the option to keep the output directory and inspect things. That's another main useful method.