Arcan scratches the same kind of itch that nix does for me but for the gnu/linux graphics stack and everything that has to interact with it.
I remain confused by Arcan, even having looked into it a few times over the years.
Ultimately it appears to be software with more fans than productive users.
I like Nix as well, you can use this one liner in OSX or Linux to try out arcan/durden/cat9, as it matures you can expect arcan applications to be made available the way html pages/apps and this kind of nix derivation would let you run the "browser":
nix run --impure 'git+https://codeberg.org/ingenieroariel/arcan?ref=nix-flake-buil...'