It is, actually, but when there is a base large/consolidated enough that “most people” (casual users, enterprise users etc those who do not experiment much) could find an ACTIVE stable version, perhaps of a certain number of distros, and various experimental versions/branches of potential future evolution.
Even such “consumer only” userbases are useful, because they can contribute in casual posts, metrics, some patches here and there helping to understand how users reason and how to tech a different reasoning, because the primary goal of FLOSS is spreading knowledge, anything anyone learn could not being personal only but shared, so not wasted, because knowledge is the sole resource that grow with it’s usage instead of being depleted.
Freedom is a consequence because we need to be free to change anything, meaning creating new knowledge, and declarative systems who “document” de facto everything being themselves code are surely the future, but to been able to spread they do need a FLOSS large enough base. So far NixOS have a vast support for pretty anything and a stable version, so this needed phase is done, but recently many projects abort/derail making a big warning sign for the future. NixOps seems to be dead, and it was the needed step to a complete NixOS, the mean to orchestrate/mass deploy forgetting Ansible/Salt as we almost forget the older and much more complex/with much more overhead Puppet/Chef/Cacti etc. NixOS is still the way to easy develop and deploy complex and often complicated modern software, but instead of showing a mainline evolution and various branches, show a fragmentation: here the Flakes, here some forks too young and with a too little community to really go somewhere while the “mainline” seems to be just kept in maintenance mode with just little version bumps.
The sole current fully working fork of NixOS is Guix System, which is good, but I think the respective communities diverge too much to share different ideas the other side regularly pick improving through diversity.
So well… I’m not much optimist…