I get why nix is attractive, really, and its cool you can build docker images.

But for people who don't know nix its a bit strange to say that Dockerfiles are tedious, and then proceed to show a much more arcane and verbose way of building them as a solution to that tediousness.

The one thing that makes Dockerfiles attractive (and Docker in general), is that they are so simple and intuitive. You can immediately leverage your basic linux knowledge. That is why a lot of people like it whose main job is not about packaging.

I think the keyword for that phrase is "reliable".

Overtime, I had to go back to fix "working" base images that had become stale, and when dealing with layers and layers of base images this really gets tedious.

BTW, I haven't dealt with nix generated images in production, I'm not aware of possible drawbacks (other than people not being familiar with nix), so I'm not really endorsing it, although I would like to try.