Not sure it's good as a starter distro, but other than that I agree. I was put off NixOS for a long time despite loving the principles behind it. Then a few weeks ago I had ChatGPT give me a short course on it, including flakes and the basics of the Nix language. I completed that in a few hours and achieved more than I ever had reading the Nix docs and blogs etc. Now I'm able to use an LLM to help me write flakes while also understanding what it is doing (I'm not a fan of blindly using AI generated code).