Meanwhile I’m over here with my 100 line flake.nix that installs system dependencies with direnv across hundreds of dev users and dozens of repositories wondering why everyone is all up in arms about boring and stable technology that solves a specific problem

In my personal life, I also like Nix for small projects, especially where you're crossing multiple ecosystems so that any one system's tooling/lockfiles aren't really enough to "enclose" the whole thing.

For that work project though, the final closure was thousands of store paths, with hundreds of source repos being brought together. A lot of that was/is essential complexity, just the reality that robotics is hard, the tools aren't as mature as in other domains, and so you have to be able to develop features and bugfixes all over a huge software stack simultaneously.