I think the takeaway is that package management is ripe for improvement, but CM tools (and more flexible tools like Ansible) do so many more things besides automating package management that I question the author's mention of them for anything besides a hook to get more pageviews.
This article has little to do with config management. A better title would be "apt, yum and brew aren't good enough; we can do better".
No, NixOS and NixOps tackle both, and you can't have the latter without the former. They are all intertwined, hence talking about both in the article :)
This article has little to do with config management. A better title would be "apt, yum and brew aren't good enough; we can do better".