"i don't use Nix partly because all my friends who use Nix have even weirder bugs than they already had and partly because i don't like the philosophy of not being able to install things at runtime."
The first part is mostly true. Nix installs things in a readonly store (/nix/store) so regular dynamically linked binaries don't work. Packaging takes a different approach and when things break, it can be difficult to work around. That said, I've run NixOS for over a year now and I find the benefits are far preferable to these downsides. It's not often I run into bugs, let alone show-stopping ones. What is annoying is how many tools are distributed without the source, so I have to run patchelf on them or use something like nix-ld.
As for the latter part, I think that using Nix will change that mentality. (Note that you can do `nix-env -iA $pkg` but it's not recommended). See, I don't even install things like rust at a global level anymore. I can always do `nix-shell -p $pkg` for an ephemeral shell if I need that, or I encode that dependency directly in the project's flake.nix. If I end up using that program a lot I will make the effort to add it to my NixOS config.