The Nix language is functionally a Lisp. It just has curly braces for sets/records, and like five keywords (e.g. with, inherit). If you learn a Lisp you'll basically know how to use Nix after reading about the syntactic differences. You can learn it in a day or two if you put in the effort, it's really not complex.
I think what people actually mean is that Nixpkgs is confusing, because that has a ton of weird utility/helper functions that you just need to know, esp. when it comes to what argument they take (which being dynamic doesn't help with at all) and Nixpkgs functions have historically had bad documentation.
I think what people actually mean is that Nixpkgs is confusing, because that has a ton of weird utility/helper functions that you just need to know, esp. when it comes to what argument they take (which being dynamic doesn't help with at all) and Nixpkgs functions have historically had bad documentation.