How to manage user configuration with flakes without home manager on nixos-21.05?

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The short version is, what do you do exactly to manage dotfiles and other config files without home-manager?

The longer version, with some context: basically I still use the same NixOS configuration file that I created 4 years ago after days of frustration going through the manuals and many blog posts. Wanted to understand it all, but in the end I settled with what I could cobble together the fastest. It still works, but want to go back to do it from scratch, and when going down the rabbit hole last night regarding “nixos dotfiles management”, the overwhelming majority of answers were: just use home manager or else you’ll be bound to re-create it. I have nothing against HM, but its documentation is confusing and I want to have a better understanding of NixOS anyway.

edit: Well, I guess I kind of answered my own question of what I should do:

  1. poke around in HM’s source
  2. improve the parts of its and the related Nix* docs that I found confusing with what I found out

: )

Also just documenting the sources I looked at:

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