Debian 13 has 69% of packages up to date: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics Years ago I used Mint and was annoyed by the outdated packages, so I used the nix package manager. But after a few Months I switched completely to nixos.

Try to use the npm package instead of the nix package, worked for me

No, I mean my app has a node and an C part, just AS an example. Could also be Java vor PHP.

And now these need different GCC compilers. And building should be easy and reproducible.

Try to develop on a system that just has node16 3 different projects at the same time that each require different node versions. Nix rocks.