Oh that’s good that they are addressing those issues with a new command. Hopefully it gets into stable soon.
Might be that nix-env -iA is bad practice! I’m strictly talking about ux design here and nix-env -iA is being recommend by blogs and nix themselves. (Nixpkgs tells you how to install using nix-env -iA)
A new user isn’t going to know what bad practice is.