I don’t think that’s how it’s intended to be used in the first place. Seems more like an accident allowed .. to resolve like that in the past. You should probably use home.file instead, something like this:
Have you checked if changes to home-manager, rather than NixOS broke it? It’s much more likely to happen there, or be a change in how nix resolves paths.
If you haven’t updated it yet, you’re supposed to keep the home-manager branch up to date with your NixOS version, i.e. update that to 22.11 as well.
target can be used if you want the name to be different from the target. Can be handy if you evaluate something more complex, but target == name is typically easier to read for simple cases.
Thats not a valid target. when using home.file the target has to be relativ to your home. So as you want your home as root, ".", though I am pretty sure that’ll break.
Instead you really should manually specify individual folders.
Also: whenever linking home.file or xdg.*File don’t do what you expect, are there any errors during the HM activation?
I have no idea what using the home directory as the target should be expected to do, either, though. You’d at the very least get really close to having recursive symlinks because your home-manager profile is in your home directory.