Never underestimate the potential of past-you to have accidentally missed a tiny but essential step in a way that won't have made a noticeable difference at the time, yeah.

I think the other foot-gun here is that the official recommendation is that library crates not check-in their lockfile (I assume because that prevents downstream crates from freely taking updates to common dependencies).

This has the unfortunate side-effect that while downstream apps might still build, the library itself (and any examples in the library repo) may not compile after some time...

This is why Nix (with flakes), in a git repository, will refuse to use a lockfile that isn't being tracked by git.

Nix also breaks if you try to update it, and you'll eventually have to update for security issues.

I'm stuck with a defunct Nix project I can't update, because crane and fenix flakes made breaking changes, and nix is giving me incomprehensible errors. I've spent enough time googling the errors that I'd be quicker to start over with a nix-less VM.

Yes, that's an excellent idea, and will free up time to deal with the *other* stupid mistakes past-me made :D