I hear ya. I recommend forking a setup and modding it slowly in a VM. That way, you can dial it in progressively.
I understand that it’s a sea change and documentation isn’t great but I’d posit that there are plenty of great setups on GitHub that will get you 99% of the way toward a working config. Whatever you decide, I hope you realize I’m not trying to pressure you. I just really love it once I got used to it’s way of working, coming from a more standard FHS Kubuntu config where I had to have weird scripts to mount discs on fstab on boot to do pretty standard stuff.
I have a VM part of my config (before I started putting anything that would even remotely expose good vectors of attack at all in an encrypted secure folder) that would work great and has all the fancy stuff like flakes, content-addressed derivations, and home-manager enabled by default.
Once a config works in NixOS, it is nearly impossible to break. That’s the thing I like about NixOS: once I get something working, it’s pretty much guaranteed to stay working and is 100% guaranteed to stay working if you never update the flake. I like to make progress and have that progress stick with me even when I refactor everything around it…and that certainly is the power of Nix/NixOS.