I think the reason why Nix is hard isn't the language (although lazily evaluated functional language is definitively a part of it), but the paradigm shift, but this is necessary for reproducibility.
Imagine if you had a distro where you couldn't depend on existing state (so you couldn't just compile something to /usr/local). Where you had to create package definition with all dependencies explicitly defined.
Kind of like using FreeBSD ports (or Gentoo) without precompiled packages and you were forced to add every package manually before using. You would also complain it is hard even if you would have to just use Makefile and shell script.
I don't think this will get easier until Nix would get embraced by other package s, making it easy to specify those components as dependencies. Now with flakes with can be composable this is possible.
Imagine if you had a distro where you couldn't depend on existing state (so you couldn't just compile something to /usr/local). Where you had to create package definition with all dependencies explicitly defined.
Kind of like using FreeBSD ports (or Gentoo) without precompiled packages and you were forced to add every package manually before using. You would also complain it is hard even if you would have to just use Makefile and shell script.
I don't think this will get easier until Nix would get embraced by other package s, making it easy to specify those components as dependencies. Now with flakes with can be composable this is possible.