It seems to be a combination of a lot of corporations using NixOS and a lot of community members using it as their personal distro. Nix is pretty flexible as a package manager but there are tensions that do crop up and you get arguments over really unimportant things that just sort of escalate because people bring in politics and all sorts of other stuff. And my understanding is that the moderation team was cooling off a lot of these disagreements, but now that there's no moderation team, I'm kind of curious to see what happens.

Disclaimer: I use nixos but try not to participate in it (private fork), after seeing how they treat prospective contributors.