The point is that, from my perspective, the value proposition rapidly diminishes when you start needing to special case things to live inside the nixos configuration world.

Other people might be getting different benefits.

(Really this is just the configuration file vs language conflict, again. Oh, this is too complicated, make a config file, oh my config file can't express this special case lets add language features, why am I using a config language instead of a read language, oh this real language is too complicated...)

LLMs change this since you can get them to create a wrapper for some software you want based on a hash, and then bump it when you want to update it.

The end goal is that you have a reproducible, immutable build contained in some git-diffed config files which is all I want.

And it becomes especially nice when you have a single repo that configures all the machines you use, from your macOS laptop to your remote servers, with common config/programs shared between them.

Whether anyone else offers a nix/flake/HM version of their software barely moves the needle on utility of this setup.

Sure, I generally didn't go very granular in things not meant for much distribution and then got somewhat less benefit (at least a condensed collection of the system's freakish config is in one source), but trying to go to that granularity level in other Linux I'd have to hope it was network related so editing network manager might be enough and then well, I'd still not follow through since that's maybe 18 months of babysitting for a small chance if the thing isn't obscure.