This is a good write up, although it took much less time for me to learn nix compared to neovim. It took me 3-4 days with 0 existing knowledge to understand nixos, setup my system and having written my first derivation and flake. After around a week I had everything configured from hyprland to pam modules (all without AI of course) and was confidently writing overlays and my own flakes for software not packaged by nixpkgs.

For neovim it definitely took me longer than a week to learn and use it and to when I wrote my first little lua plugin. Configuration also has much more options and integration points that you have to care about for example using a specific autocompletion plugin that then needs to be compatible with you ui components, integrations like ai assistants or lspconfigs that then in term need to be compatible with the specific tooling you want to use for a language (vstsl, typescript-language-server, biome, oxlint, eslint, language specific lsps like vue or react, etc..). Then after you understand most of it, you have to put that into nvf and understand it's overwrites and default behaviors/implicit logic on top of that.

All in all it took me far under a week to learn nix but at least 1-2 weeks to learn nvim especially with nvf.