I’ve only tinkered with Nix in a VM so I’m no expert, but I will say this: for every person that raves about it, it seems there’s someone else who decided that the hassle of learning an entirely new way to do pretty much everything on a Linux system, often with sparse documentation, wasn’t worth the time investment.

Your experience sounds pretty much par for the course, to me. People who think Arch is hard have obviously never tried Nix.

Just to be clear, these are the most popular metal bands from each country, according to worldwide listening stats, correct?

Sabbath > Maiden any day of the week.