Super helpful and relevant!

Nice hearing a deep dive into some one else’s tooling setup!

Regarding dotfiles repos, please have a look at home-manager: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager
it enables managing most application configuration using all the same functional programming language.
As a bonus, it makes it easy to provide necessary packages from nixpkgs instead of apt/brew.

And regarding terminal editors, I recently discovered helix: https://helix-editor.com/
It tries to provide a very vim-like experience while minimizing the amount of necessary configuration.
A lot of features that neovim needs plugins for are provided by default: LSP support, fuzzy search, surround keybinds etc.
It also provides TUI menus for all important functions which makes learning the default keybindings a breeze.