I think this may be far more personal than expected. One of the things I like about running NixOS on my workstations and servers is that it's mostly hands off and right where I left it. I commonly go weeks to months or more without touching it, and it's all right there, organized, and ready to go. It allows me to offload a lot of the context and there's not much to have to remember.

I see both of your points here. I also have lost muscle memory on nix-rebuild-shell, and it's a technical onboarding to get that back. What I'm hoping for is a graphical installer within NixOS that abstracts it away for nontechncial users