MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

Up until the release of Catalina, I've always upgraded to the latest version of macOS within a month or two. But some of the changes this time is really stopping me from upgrading.

As of Catalina, there's no sane way to install the Nix package manager without losing functionality because macOS now disallows creating new files in the root directory[1]. Nix stores its packages in the /nix directory and it's not possible to migrate without causing major disruptions for existing NixOS and other Linux users. This is too bad, since apart from Nix being a nice package manager, it also provides a sane binary package for Emacs. The Homebrew core/cask versions only provides a limited feature set[2][3].

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2925

[2]: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/31510

[3]: https://github.com/caldwell/build-emacs/search?q=support+is%...

IMHO the original choice of the path seems incredibly ill-advised and the main burden lies with the original developers.

sometimes old errors and mistakes come back and bite

What is special about /nix that would make it better suited elsewhere? Aesthetic? Clutter? I don't think there are any technical reasons why the root of the filesystem is important. The /nix folder is just another folder with some ACLs/Permissions (however OSX works, idk)

Historically / has been reserved for the use of the Unix system (the distribution that packaged it, not the computer you're running on). Local programs were installed to /usr/local. Packages installing themselves in /packagename are making your root directory like Windows' Start Menu. Furthermore, if your, say, Physics department has 20 machines, your sysadmin would install everything on an NFS share, which probably got mounted at /opt. Your sysadmin definitely did not want to mount /this, /that, /theother.

So while /nix is no problem from the filesystem driver, it is completely flaunting established Unix norms.