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.

Could you clarify what you mean regarding Zed? I checked just now and it looks like Nixpkgs had the latest version 0.214.7 within 24 hours of its release: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/466449