Sure, NixOS is 'unlike anything else', but only in a few very specific ways (namely the filesystem structure and mutability of system files) and while you could see that as being "difficult to make things work on", another way to see it is that it catches a lot of wrong assumptions for you early. Kind of like the Rust compiler.

Both filesystem structure and mutability of system files are things you should really not be assuming in the first place. Not just for the sake of NixOS, but also for the sake of many other configurations that are much more difficult to test against (because eg. they are embedded systems that only run on specific hardware).

See also: how DaVinci Resolve insists on living in a very specific filesystem path and how that causes trouble on *any* distro that isn't one of the officially supported ones.