Mise is a hard sell for me when I can have pure Nix-shells. However, I can see this gaining wider adoption since it's learning curve is so much lower than Nix.
I've seen several Mac users have the same experience: going all-in on nix-darwin and then getting frustrated. But nix-darwin is one of the worst ways of getting into Nix, because its goal is to make your whole macOS system configurable with Nix, but macOS is a moving target and (unlike Linux) not built to be modular at all. I know people put a lot of hard work into nix-darwin, but it's simply not the main focus of Nix as a whole and sadly it might not ever become a seamless experience. (I'm not a mac user so not keeping up, but I do see colleagues trying it out from time to time.)
The solution here is: use Nix but don't use nix-darwin (at least not until you're generally comfortable with Nix for package management and dev shells). You do NOT have to use nix-darwin on Mac to reap 80% of the benefits of Nix (especially in a team setting).
After dropping nix-darwin, I think almost everyone will find that it's very easy to use Nix for sharing project setups with bespoke tooling. I just had a new team member onboard, knowing nothing about Nix, in a day or less, with several different languages and unusual tools.
> After dropping nix-darwin, I think almost everyone will find that it's very easy to use Nix for sharing project setups with bespoke tooling
Ahh, but I tried that too. I originally decided to play with nix-darwin because I was on a contract that used nix in their repos to ease onboarding of academic collaborators.
In practice, it was complicated enough that most of us ended up relying on the 2 nix experts to make any real changes, and when they left, the nix configs stagnated.
It might be the case that nix-darwin, and our particular python/ML repos, were "hard mode" for nix, but I truly think I gave it a fair shake.
If nix requires a lot of effort to do anything off the beaten path, it's just not the tool for me.
To be clear, I don't try to Nix-everything. I just use it to 1) install a bunch of CLI tools to my nix-env, and 2) dev-shells. That's pretty much it, though. Even that is a huge boon. Even so, I'm keeping an eye on mise, for sure.
If you think of it more of in the context of making it easy for people other than you and your bespoke machine to bootstrap a project, that's where it really shines. The toml config is very simple for people to understand.
I use it because I want people to be able to get projects up and running quickly without having to comb through an outdated README, trying to deal with all of the different ways people like to install and use non-compiled languages, etc. Managing anything Node/Ruby/Python is all annoying.
mise does 90% of what I need, but at only 1% of the hassle.
I like the idea of nix, and the future of building software is clearly something like it... I'm just not sure it'll be nix itself.