Yeah... At this point I would give into Nix for managing the underlying arch system. It's not a gentle learning curve I believe, but at least the community is strong around nix

That's what I use too on Bazzite, custom image for system level stuff, and home-manager for user-level stuff.

The nice thing about Fedora Silverblue's model is that it is literally a container image, so to "build" your image you can run any arbitrary commands, so it's way simpler than nix.