I’m yet to be entirely sold on that, mostly because I think Nix the language isn’t anywhere near as accessible as Dockerfiles, but I’ll be the first one cheering if Nix does manage to take over.
You might be interested in Devbox (http://jetpack.io/devbox)! We built Devbox because we were frustrated with our Docker based dev environments, and our goal is to provide the power of Nix with a more accessible interface (similar to yarn or other package managers).
We're open source and rapidly adding features, you can check us out on Github at https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox