I've only barely used Nix on OSX to manage packages and I thought it felt awkward at the time. But I had also barely used NixOS at that time. Today I'm happily running NixOS on my NAS and my "gaming" desktop. My son is running it for his desktop as well. What feels awkward and fragile on OSX is far more stable on NixOS. But you do have to learn some of the Nix syntax and ways of doing things which it sounds like you're already getting some of on OSX. The reason I'm going to use it on OSX again is mostly to get consistent HOME configuration and tooling across all of my devices. I'll manage my OSX home dir and tools with the exact same file across multiple computers.

My principle of adoption was essentially this but in reverse; use it on the system I use the most (macOS), learn, and then use my niche knowledge to apply it to less frequently used computers like my gaming rig.

Along the way I acquired enough talent that use at work seemed reasonable.

As time has gone on, however, I have found things like the stringent need for everything to be built results in archaic packages versions in nixpkgs, etc., while core waits to bump the rustc version. Thus my return to using brew for almost everything albeit managed via nix-homebrew.

Case in point: I use zed, which relies on cutting edge rust features, which nix cannot deploy because of stability concerns. Everyone is right in this situation, but that left me with an archaic version of zed until I moved to the homebrew version.