"Someone else's job" doesn't help getting the software into my user's hands.

I need a solution that works for my users regardless.

If they're not using your software they're not your users.

You seem to be treating this like a commercial endeavor in which you have much to gain from adoption by nontechnical people. I don't really see why though. It looks like you're developing non-commercial open source software for an audience of developers.

You are taking on the responsibility of being compatible with a large variety of different people's opinions on how software should be built, configured, and distributed. Yes that's a lot of work. Distributions have people willing to do that work for software they or their users (who can ask) care about.

Linux evangelists on the internet are some of the most unhelpful and useless people you will ever come across. My condolences in advance for every "ackshually you must pray and wait 10 years that some Debian maintainer to pick it up" reply.

I get that but I feel like its a bit different for linux users. The ecosystem has way more folks that are used to building their own tools relative to Win/Mac. Especially for something like nix. I've built nixpkgs for tools I've wanted to try & use. For something like this, I'd stick with cargo and let others do the packaging.