Hehe. It’s fair, and I don’t even really disagree. I’ve certainly wished that nix-env wasn’t the first recommendation many people encounter when they’re trying to figure out how to install stuff. (Link is a comment in a thread I made a while back about how Nix’s affordances map to language and how that affects new users flailing around to figure out how their human motivations map onto the toolkit.)
As long as we’ve got these imperative workflows, I think it’d be nice for them to readily flow into “best practice” whenever possible.
I also suspect it would be a win for the “learning journey” (cc @zmitchell) if every “imperative” tutorial and guide could end with a final step or a link out to how you could ~lift the imperative work you just did into a declarative format.