Nix is centered around the local Nix store and binary caching.

As long as the specific version of Erlang you’re using is present in either your Nix store or the global cache for your OS and arch (at cache.nixos.org), you should not need to compile anything.

And if you rely on custom builds, you can just setup your own binary cache. This is similar to remote caching in Bazel.

Some more details on Nix caching here: https://zero-to-nix.com/concepts/caching/

We do exactly this at my dayjob - we have (multiple) very specific combinations of (erlang, elixir, hex, rebar3) that we use which are pinned to exactly the versions we need. We have a private Nix cache so we only have to build them once.

https://www.cachix.org/ simplifies running a custom cache. Well worth the money, IMO.

That said, learning nix and setting up a nix cache is still a lot of work. Docker buildx might offer you some more knobs to cache portions of your build in a finer-grained manner without having to take the nix plunge.