I've only barely used Nix on OSX to manage packages and I thought it felt awkward at the time. But I had also barely used NixOS at that time. Today I'm happily running NixOS on my NAS and my "gaming" desktop. My son is running it for his desktop as well. What feels awkward and fragile on OSX is far more stable on NixOS. But you do have to learn some of the Nix syntax and ways of doing things which it sounds like you're already getting some of on OSX. The reason I'm going to use it on OSX again is mostly to get consistent HOME configuration and tooling across all of my devices. I'll manage my OSX home dir and tools with the exact same file across multiple computers.