Having used Fedora Silverblue in the past, I went all in on nixOS as it seemed perfect for me.

Setup was easier than Arch and I had more trust in the stability of the system because there's no state/config that I wasn't aware of (albeit after a learning curve).

The biggest issue though is how rigid it is. The "nix way" spreads like a plague into everything and I often felt like I couldn't do basic tasks such as install some node modules without having to relearn how to do it in nix.

I told myself that FHS was a good enough fallback, but that just wasn't the case. Despite using FHS for node development, I still encountered nix-specific issues that needed a nix-specific fix (i.e. using prisma binaries).

Yeah I ran into this with Flutter, where upstream's install method boiled down to "Clone the Git repo and allow Flutter to write into the path where the repo is cloned to in an ad-hoc manner." Needless to say, huge conflict with the Nix Way. When the Flutter 2 -> 3 migration happened, the upgrade for the Nix package was taking so long (months) that I eventually said, you know what, screw it, I can't let productivity get bogged down for a reason like that.

I still believe that the Nix way is the right approach, it's just going to take more time to mature out the Nix ecosystem's integrations with various language and package ecosystems to make it more dependable for developers.