From my very short experience so far. It really depends on how deep you want to go and what your use case is. If you just want to install applications and use them then it’s not really any different than installing them via terminal on other distros. You just make a list of the app names in a config file and then rebuild and can go about your day.

If I’d wanted to use my laptop with NixOS as my Fedora desktop then I’d be done setting it up 5min after I’ve installed the system. The only time I touch terminal on my Fedora system is when I turn on PC and check for updates because it’s faster than waiting for Software to refresh.

Probably the biggest benefit other than reproducibility is that you get immutability without reliance on flatpaks.