For me I can say on-demand replicability of my system is what I find most incredible. I have data backups, but if something goes wrong with my system, how can i get it back up and running quickly with minimal time spent reconfiguring setting after setting after config after config? NixOS is great for that.

But as a Linux beginner I didn't really care about that because just getting stuff to work was a huge achievement, lol.

To answer your question...I also remember when shopping around for distros that I was looking at a lot of things that didn't really ultimately matter. For example, Pop!_OS has a version with Nvidia drivers pre-installed...but it turns out installing those drivers is pretty trivial in most modern distros. I also like Pop Shell, but that's also not too hard to get in any distro running GNOME.

So maybe it would help to have some kind of a NixOS "app store" of sorts where the top features/functionality n00bs are looking for are bundled together and catalogued in a browseable way so folks can easily "shop around" for the particular features they're looking for and build their own config. Then they'd stick with NixOS because to replicate their setup on any other distro would require a ton of manual annoying work every time.