I agree with you, BTW. Nix is terrible at the beginning and the documentation is by far the worst I've seen. Yes, it exists, but good golly...

It took me a day learned Python. It was that easy. Nix took significantly longer and there are parts I run into nowadays that still make me question what's going on, because they are from functional programming and that is nearly always horribly explained.

But, and here's the big but, learning nix is worth it. As the other (uncompassionate) person said, think of it as JSON (with functional programming).

Attribute sets = dictionaries/maps/JSON objects

Attributes can be assigned numbers, strings, other attribute sets, or functions.

New context is added via the let ... in syntax.

If you need some help, maybe examples, you can ask and I'll try to explain.