I think so too. GNOME famously doesn’t prioritize customisation, which despite lots of angry complaints, still doesn’t intend to change. That’s because they already have a solid user base, a silent group that couldn’t care less about customisation and gaming features, and mostly want it to “just work”.

Think the Linux Torvalds type of person, using a workstation distro. Best thing GNOME can do is to minimize changes that break user’s workflows and make sure the defaults are good.

The side effect is that they turn off their corporate machines after work and that’s it for the day. They aren’t going on forums to defend GNOME vs KDE arguments.

NixOS consist of a bunch of options that you define using the nix programming language. Since it’s a programming language, everything is well defined and organised into single place.

Technically, someone could build a GUI configuration editor with sane defaults and clearly organised pages of settings, which generates a configuration for you. This could immediately change NixOS from the most tedious to a relatively easy to use distro.