Plus there’s network shares. Multiple people in my home with linux PCs, each with their own slice of the NFS pie based on user perms. Sure, it’s not secure, but these are people I live with, not state-sponsored hackers.
All that said, I’d also love a simpler single-user perm setup. For VMs, containers, etc it would be amazing
I've used nixos and I don't really see how nixos is special apart from the declarative config. The same can/should be done with any distro and any config manager.
And unless you were running Podman in rootless mode, the same setup applies to containers too.
For me and my home network, if the default security mode is “manage users yourself”, i chmod -R 777 on all applicable files and call it a day. Nixos lets me be lazy, as all nixos modules (that I’ve ever used) have their own user setups with minimal permissions by default