I’d been hearing a lot about NixOS so I did a VM install. It wanted me to setup my own partitions manually without even giving preset sane defaults like I was back in 1994 installing Slackware.

Nope. My OS is a tool, not a lifestyle.

Don’t listen to him! Just start using Nix to manage dependencies and dev environments for your projects but keep your OS the same until you are really good at Nix