I think so but this method does remove the quite significant barrier of having to figure out nix's language and quirks, so I'd argue there's merit to the workflow. Still, you're trading it for containerization know-how, so not necessarily the best choice.

Yeah it does. I actually use nix as my base OS on one machine. But when I need to work on a project that will never be packaged with nix, and I need all the dependencies, it really becomes impossible to just use nix.

Nix makes an amazing bas OS, however.

I use it to share environments with a small team. Just have distrobox specific Docker files and we can all spin up the same distrobox environment locally.

We end up having a different base docker file (e.g. our distrobox one has editors and stuff), but we all share the same project specific docker file. That same project specific file gets used in CI/CD and deployment, but with a minimal base. So all in all, I would say it's even better than Vagrant because we run the same system in production.