I want to love s6 but every time I see the existence of s6-rc-compile I get heated. I'm sure there are excellent reasons behind it but I personally don't want services to work that way.
Yah, that does look awfully baroque. My experience with s6 has largely been minor tweaks to an existing setup where the complexity was hidden away from me. I used to use runit for managing daemons, but nowadays my supervisor of choice is docker compose. process-compose does look enticing though, and the Nix world seems pretty fond of it.