I have no idea how you're getting packages older than Debian. Unstable is a rolling release and stable has a 6 month release cadence with no LTS. Were you pulling from an old dead repo? If you followed an outdated guide, they probably linked you to an old one.

I do agree that the learning curve is steep and the knowledge is nontransferrable though. In my case, that just encouraged me to unify all my systems onto NixOS at home. Not sure if that's a solution or addiction yet.

anything I tried getting from their repos was always way further behind the mac OS homebrew or Debian apt versions.

Nixpkgs are the most up to date of any package respiratory source

It is likely that you were using the current 'stable' channel that does not have the very latest packages. The 'unstable' channel does have the very latest packages and is what I think most people use.

nixOS is really slick in concept, but has a steep learning curve to get it properly customized as a daily driver. The learned skills don’t really translate outside the nix realm either, so I decided it was too much effort for my use case. I love this concept as a way to build reproducable servers or workstations tho, so I’ll def be playing with it again.

I totally agree, I wish it was easier to learn.