This isn’t “most users”, this is a large company building a product on top of Nix. I’m pretty sure most orgs using Nix at a minimum have a custom overlay.
If you identify these things as an issue, any competent engineer should find a variety of solutions with search and/or LLM assistance within an hour, since they’re not super obscure requirements.
I’m not saying Railway didn’t do this and realize that these common solutions weren’t viable for them, but it’s odd to not mention anything they tried to get around it.
To emphasize this point: dleslie's comment is valid on a blog post "we tried Nix for a while to manage our dependencies, we are just building an app and want builds to work, and we decided to move on". For an end user, it is absolutely understandable to assume "nix = nixpkgs".
But as kfajdsl points out: that's not what TFA is. This is a company building a product on top of Nix. Package management is their expertise. Anyone using Nix in that capacity understands the distinction between nix and nixpkgs. Which they certainly do--GP only remarked it was odd they didn't explain it, not that they didn't know.
If you identify these things as an issue, any competent engineer should find a variety of solutions with search and/or LLM assistance within an hour, since they’re not super obscure requirements.
I’m not saying Railway didn’t do this and realize that these common solutions weren’t viable for them, but it’s odd to not mention anything they tried to get around it.