Stick to the manuals - and yes, this is different than other distros
The manuals suffer from similar problems, example below. I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t read manuals. In fact, they’re the only reliable resource that actually tries to explain what is happening under the hood. But it’s also a mess, which is sad.
Actually, have you ever tried
man configuration.nix?
I’ve tried it, and it suffers from the same problem as that HTML page (every option listed at once), except that it’s easier to navigate since it doesn’t grind your computer to a halt.
I forgot to mention it in my post. I found this method after looking for a Nix analogue to M-x describe-variable. The thing is, I would have never even tried it myself, since I’ve never seen a man page for a configuration file before. I don’t think I’m alone in this regard. I’ve tried doing man nix by myself, but that didn’t yield a lot of useful information. The NixOS manual doesn’t even mention that a man entry for configuration.nix exists until the Prometheus exporters section! Most people will ignore it, since they don’t even use Prometheus.
Personally, I think that any information that allows users to learn how to configure their system by themselves should be one of the first things mentioned in manuals. Hiding that information will not help anyone, it just leads to lots of unnecessary questions.