@nellePoint my conclusion was "do you want to put in a little bit of work to have a system that works, or do you want to put in a lot of work to have a system that works every time" -- on some level i just don't break my system frequently enough to justify writing a fully declarative config for my system. it's way easier to reinstall once every x years if i have to, but then not worry about it as long as shit doesn't break (which it generally doesn't)
i see it much the same as automating a factory that will only ever produce 1 product once. any benefit the tooling provides isn't worth the cost of learning how to use it and setting it up to work for you. better to do things manually ("manually until it hurts")
@nellePoint also the other thing that did it for me is that AUR is too good and nixos packages sometimes don't update fast enough -- they were on gnome 47 for a long time even though gnome 48 had been out for months
