Not a sysadmin, but a capable user.
People shouldn’t just accept technology as magic. They should understand at least the basic principles of the technology around them. Corporations want us to be dumb and incapable. Look at cars, you seriously can’t expect a normal person to fix anything on them. But that’s not because of inherent complexity, but because corporations want us to just buy new parts when they think it’s time.
Sapere aude was true in the 19th century and it’s true today as well.
The sentiment should rather be, that the system maintains itself. And that’s actually something I would get behind.
Tinkering around is cool, but I’m in my 30s and when my girlfriend’s build pipeline finishes, I’ll be a father, I can’t spend 4h every week fixing stuff, I need a reliable platform to work on. Currently that is indeed a mix of Debian and Nix for me.
At least the normal update process should work completely transparently for the user.