If you `git blame` the software you're interested in, I can't imagine it should take too long to find the last commit that had the version you want. Then you could either use that, or for the first commit with the new version, use commit~. Or anywhere in between depending on whether dependencies are important to you (that's at the limit of my git-fu, but I imagine you could do some kind of restricted blame to then find the dependency version you care about if you do care, and recursively do that until you have exactly what you want).

If you have a CI system that's building containers (e.g. using flakes), you can have the nixpkgs version you're using pinned in your own config, so you can just look at your own (smaller) history.

This should all be way easier than trying to do it on any other distribution.

I’ve never used it but https://trynix.dev/ should allow you to find the versions of nixpkgs with specific versions of a set of packages