Ah that really sucks. Who should be on the hook for replacing and fixing all this?

That sounds like it should be seriously checked. Hopefully there’s no lead, but that’s not sure given what you’re saying.

Well then it’s too late… I’d much rather avoid people the excruciating pain.

The main advantage of NixOS containers, to my limited understanding, is that since they are built by Nix, all dependencies are updated with nixpkgs (no woefully out of date stuff in one of the layers of the container image) and you can pin these if you need to.

I’d like to understand the differences and similarities between the two better too though.