Those things (parentheses and free software) don't make Guix a bad solution. It's just not for you.
>Tens or hundreds
You never wrote a single line or Scheme or Common Lisp and it shows.
No one writes thousands of nested lines down. They modularize it into functions because Lisp was basically made literally for that.
Get some Emacs modules and code, such as Mastodon.el. Look at the source code. Far easier to understand than any C or C++ codebase, not to mention Rust.