Yes, you should pretend this command doesn't exist.

There is no need to be using NixOS to do so.

> Oh, and the nix package manager is still unbearably slow

This doesn't match my experience so I wonder what you're doing differently. It's only slow if you're missing the cache, either local or remote, as then you need to build things locally, unlike apk and pacman which install only prebuilt packages from repositories. Nix is fundamentally different to those package managers. I find it very snappy.