If I understand this correctly, upcoming Ca-derivations will fix this by making these situations expected, properly-handled cases rather than a weird bug? https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Ca-derivations
replies(3):
The point of the article to me (author) was that i found it odd that Nix replaces the derivations when calculating the output path but not the derivation path. (talking about "paths" in Nix is so hard!)