However, I’m also curious about using NixOS for dev environments. I think there’s untapped potential there.
containers contain stuff the way an open bookcase contains books, they're just namespaces and cgroups on a file system overlay, more or less, held together by willpower not boundaries:
https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/10/what-even-is-a-container/
https://github.com/p8952/bocker
as a firm required to care about infosec, we appreciate the stance in their (2). and MacOS VMs are so fast now, they might as well be containers except, you know, they work. (if not fast, that should be fixed.)
that said, yes, running local minikube and the like remain incredibly useful for mocking container envs where the whole environment is inside a machine(s) boundary. containers are _almost_ as awesome as bookcases…