In terms of boilerplate/reusability, I use the dendritic pattern with den (https://github.com/denful/den) which cuts down so much on boilerplate stuff. You can put all your nvidia stuff into a module and only import it on certain machines that need it, that sort of thing. Makes managing my laptop, desktop and handheld pretty easy. Of course, that means flakes, that means one more thing to learn on top of that as well.

wrapper-modules might be interesting for you for making some of your environment more portable, Vimjoyer has a video about setting that up: https://birdeehub.github.io/nix-wrapper-modules/md/intro.html

Also, don't forget that you can use build-vm to build a VM out of your nix configuration too.

I'm not using Nix on my homelab as I'm pretty standardized on Proxmox so I can't say I know much about how difficult it is to set up Minecraft the nix way. I'm basically using a docker image in a VM for it.

The hardest part is avoiding systemd if you feel that strongly against it (as I did at one point long ago as well, still not happy with it).

All in all, I think it was pretty fair and interesting blogpost.

I read the whole article / blogpost and think your critique is fair.

Sometimes doing things “the nix way” can make workflows harder instead of simpler.

Even with all the benefits and flaws Nixos has.