I feel you (like many people) got burned by the steep learning curve. Empirically some pretty high powered companies use nix successfully. It's of course always difficult to know the counterfactual (would they have been fine with ubuntu) but the power to get SBOMs, patch a dependencies deep in the dependency stack, roll back entire server installs etc. really helps these people scale.
nixpkgs is also the largest and most up to date package set (followed by arch) so there's clearly something in the technology that allows a loosely organised group of people to scale to that level.
nixpkgs is also the largest and most up to date package set (followed by arch) so there's clearly something in the technology that allows a loosely organised group of people to scale to that level.