No, you're 100% correct. Despite the prosthelytization you'll get from many died-in-the-wool users who forgot what it was like in the beginning, in order to use NixOS effectively you either need to learn Nix, or be willing to spend a lot of time on IRC asking questions, which will end up with... you learning Nix. That's the reality. I think I spent something like 3 weeks porting my server configuration from Ubuntu to NixOS, by hand, piece by piece, many years ago. Admittedly I think we're better off than we were 7 years ago, but it's still not a grand slam. Even things like basic GUI installers that can set up your filesystem don't exist! Manually screwing with partition layouts to get volume encryption isn't easy to use at all, honestly.

There are an array of flaws with the tools but, despite that, they are unbelievable powerful and you can do things in NixOS you can't dream of doing elsewhere, and it makes things like using OpenZFS or whatever pretty easy and simple. And it makes some thing far more difficult than that, nearly trivial. But only once you know what you're doing. But that's just the reality: it's an extremely powerful tool that has many rough edges. Saying it's "the easiest distro to use" is a complete joke, and I wish fellow NixOS users didn't have some weird propensity to practically lie about how good it is on that front. I say this as someone who has been a NixOS developer and user for like, ~7 years and who apparently(?!) has over 1,000 commits to the tree now, too. Trying to actually sit down at a terminal and sell unconvinced people on it opened my eyes quite a bit. It's good, but lying about what it is and isn't is a good way to burn peoples faith.