[pricci]

Although I haven't really used it, jetpack.io's Devbox [0] is an abstraction over Nix for the usage you describe.

[0] https://www.jetpack.io/devbox

[yeck]

I've played around with it a little bit, but not enough to make any judgements on it. Something like devbox could be the sort of thing to make nix-shell accessible enough to see wider adoption.