Among other things, it features automatic TLS via ACME and dead-simple configuration for my most common use cases: namely, serving a directory of static files and reverse-proxying to an app server.
It is written in Go, but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "cobbled together."
I'm also a fan of Traefik but it's strictly a reverse proxy, there's not even built-in support for serving static files. But it's great if you have e.g. a bunch of containers on a single host and you want to front them all with a single load balancer.
But do you know, if they’re a nicer options finder? The one I found where you just search all several thousand options kinda sucks. I want to just see my package (say, ssh) and just the ssh options, but the results get littered with irrelevancy.
When I roughly know what I'm doing I use search.nixos.org; if you give it the full services.foo prefix it's usually relevant enough, e.g. for ssh you'd want "services.openssh", which you can find skimming through the results of just searching 'ssh' first:
For anything I'm not 100% sure will be obvious I search through a local clone of the nixpkgs repo directly, but I'll be honest and say I just never took time to search for a better tool
My main usage of Nix is on non-NixOS machines, and I use Home Manager, and while it has a similar problem, just searching the options in the packages it provides configuration for is a smaller issue.
Not sure if this helps you at all or not, it really depends on your usage of Nix, but for managing user configuration I do recommend Home Manager.