For run of the mill sys admin stuff, you don't need to dive too deep. Even my reasonably complex needs of containers and mixed workstations is, imo pretty parsable from an intuitive perspective. I was reluctant at first but once I saw how a general sys admin would use it, it made my life so much easier.
I guess that's true, tbh the reproducibility aspect is really what I like about nix, and I guess I'm confusing a bit here. I guess I'm saying nix gives a good compromise with immutable generations and high repro, but you've convinced me it's not immutable per-se.
At the surface, you can pin the commit you pull packages from, but if you want to go deeper, you can essentially define your own channel and dependent binaries, allowing you to store every aspect of how a generation is built.
For run of the mill sys admin stuff, you don't need to dive too deep. Even my reasonably complex needs of containers and mixed workstations is, imo pretty parsable from an intuitive perspective. I was reluctant at first but once I saw how a general sys admin would use it, it made my life so much easier.
Highly recommended.