Seriously, I don't understand all people on the internet that say that they don't understand why NixOS isn't more popular. I personally like it, but I would not recommend it to person who already gets overwhelmed by Arch, for example.

On the other hand, people saying this may be using NixOS more as server os and development tool, and they talk about recognition in professional development community than just recognition from linux users as a general use OS.

I would recommend nixos to a server administrator or developer (reproducibility, declaring everything in one syntax and on one cluster of config files...), person who likes to experiment with configurations and software (rollback on an older versions and ability to use nix shell to test software), and other people who may like it's features enough to go through big amount of issues it has.