I'm a big fan of NixOS, but sometimes it is obscenely difficult to test new things.
Example is iptables-nft. On every other distribution installing that is enough to make all applications use the nft version. In NixOS, you can easily change the environment path to iptables-nft, but any package that can modify rules won't be updated. And a package that updates rules is systemd. So attempting what is normally a 1 minute change is now recompiling every single package.
NixOS doesn't curate a default desktop experience like Fedora does, but it's also a great place to enjoy some of this tech early, and in a very risk-free way thanks to declarative configuration and rollbacks. PipeWire has been effortless to set up (and impressively compatible, performance, and unobtrusive in its own right!) on NixOS for some time now.
A rolling release or a cutting edge kind of distro, even with regular releases, can be really nice if you're into exploring this stuff, like you say.