For the last two months I was using Fedora Linux instead of NixOS, and I kinda liked it. Right now I am not planning to return to Nix. So, the question arises: Why?
Because I have some stuff to be done, and I don't want to waste my life configuring some feature X, if it was already configured by someone else. Now, that's the beauty of GNU/Linux and free software in general: you can choose, whether to trust someones software or not, or how it was configured. If you are anti-systemd, for example, go ahead and choose the distro without it. That's the power you should ideally have over your software.
There are people, who cherish their vim/neovim/emacs/dwm/etc. configs on the Internet. They pray for minimalist, CLI programs, they use old ThinkPads, etc. I don't know, which of them are familiar to you, but I personally think, that the good example of this kind of people can be Luke Smith. He has some extereme views not only on the software, but on everything. This is, however, not the point. The points is, many people, who spend many many hours painstakingly configuring their OSes, are not even people, who are related to actual programming. They don't write a lot of code, so they have time to write their configs. Why would you recreate the bicycle from scratch, if you already have a variety of bikes that are any shape and colors you would ever imagine? I suppose, only for educational purposes, to realise, how that thing works, etc.
I might be wrong, actually. There were times, when I was overwhelmed with modern software complexity. For example, I hate running server stuff in Docker, because it's too high on server's resources, and it it sometimes not as easy as just configuring everything manually.
When I choose software, I ask myself: "Will it simplify my life?". That is all.