I’d say it’s a pretty steep curve unfortunately, and nixOS is also not perfect, mind you

• The nix language (that is used for the configuration) itself has sometimes weird syntax. It’s also a proper functional programming languages with all bells ans whistles that brings
• The documentation is less than ideal (to put it mildley). Most of the times you need to search reddit (rip) and the forums to find how to do certain things.
• Nix is not FHS compliant. Basically everything is a symlink to some file in the nix store, located in /nix. Packages installed with nix are patched to work that way, but things not installed with it might not run out of the box

As for trying it out, yeah copying the config from the vm should work (except for maybe some hardware-specific stuff). remember to backup your stuff just in case lol