Yeah, I'm just addressing you specifically, you could switch easily and Nix has a much larger package selection (outside of GUI apps on macOS). And it immediately can do more via nix-shell -p, which can be also be used as shebang.
But yeah, Nix is much more than a homebrew replacement and that has its downsides.
I'm curious of what the packages are because I only have ~10 packages that I use from homebrew, either very Mac-specific or that have better packaging (ffmpeg, mpv)
They are all projects that distribute Go binaries on GitHub and have official homebrew taps
The 2/3 that are on nix are both out of date and created by some outside party.
I do not see a world where I provide nix stuff for my projects. There are already too many packages managers and I'm not spending my unpaid time to support all of them. GitHub and brew are my limit, def not learning nix just for this
If the complaint is that other systems are less up-to-date than brew is, then the number of things installed is still the issue - whether they're dependencies or not.
Unless, of course, the other system manages dependencies differently, say it compiles in static versions of required libraries at build-time, or divides them up into fewer dependent packages.
Maybe it would make sense for nix to add a mode that basically aliases that first command to `nix install <package>`.