Very true. I made a point of doing it by forking an already working nix-config from github that used what I wanted to use. This one drew me in because it used xmonad along with home-manager and flakes. Honestly, it really WAS pretty confusing at first (due to that setup using secrets and git-crypt to obfuscate some of the files) but Nix had some helpful error messages that allowed me to finally get it working in a VM. Then, I got it installed as my daily driver when it was stable enough. Today, I provision all of my different systems in my network (ARM, x86, Nix-Darwin, Nix on a routers and network gear, etc) using one nix-config that contains all of the machine configs as different outputs.