I’ve worked on dev tooling in a fairly large company. Especially for cyber security, do not get a Mac. A lot of the tools are just different enough on a Mac that they will make your life much harder.
I would say it’s actually easier in many cases. Nix has really fantastic packaging tooling. You do have to learn a bit of the nix language, however (not become an expert).
The issue comes when trying to build from source. In most other distros, ou just follow the readme. In nix, you have to package it.