Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I was involved in establishing a bunch of build and deployment infrastructure at my org that's currently based around large (300mb+) "bundle" Debian packages, but that bundle package is composed of hundreds of small sub-packages, most of which don't change day to day (it's extremely convenient to ship them all as one big unit for versioning sanity and ABI consistency reasons).

Nix seems like it would be a great fit for this use case, but there are a number of things about it which give me pause, particularly when it may be possible to get at least some of its advantages by applying the lessons learned to a system built out of boring, old-school packaging tools.