I do think the community recognizes this to be an issue and is steadily working on improving beginner-friendly docs. I am about seven years into using Nix for various things, and can mostly solve most problems, but I won’t deny that the learning curve at the beginning was brutal. The real and most meaningful unlock is learning to read the nix language well enough to follow what is happening, then checking out nixpkgs locally to look at crate derivations and such to understand what idioms exist in “real code.” The module system also took ages to click for me, but was a big unlock.

Anyway, I hope the community continues to make the onboarding process more welcoming and easy. Personally, I am hopeful that guix will really take off at some point, because even though I get it now, I’d way rather read lisp than nix.