We've been using Nix flakes and direnv (https://direnv.net/) for developer environments and NixOS with https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs for prod/deploys - takes serious digging and time to set up, but excellent experience with it so far.
I’ve been using Nix for the past year and it really feels like the holy grail for stable development environments. Like you said—it takes serious time to set up, but it seems like that’s an unavoidable reality of easily sharable dev envs.
Serious time to set up _and_ maintain as the project changes. At least, that was my experience. I really _want_ to have Nix-powered development environments, but I do _not_ want to spend the rest of my career maintaining them because developers refuse to "seriously dig" to understand how it works and why it decided to randomly break when they added a new dependency.
I think this approach works best in small teams where everyone agrees to drink the Nix juice. Otherwise, it's caused nothing but strife in my company.
