Couldn't you replicate all of your setup with qemu microvm?

Without nix I mean

Yep. What nix adds is a declarative and reproducible way to build customized OS images to boot into.

Nix is the best answer to "works on my machine," which is a problem I've seen at pretty much every place I've ever worked.

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		It's also an answer to caching with /nix/store. I wish more cloud services supported "give me your nixosConfiguration or something similar" instead of providing api to build containers/vms imperatively. Dockerfile and everything that mimics it is my least favorite way to do this.