I wonder if NixOS is a vacuum coffee maker for how confusing nix looks when you see it for the first time or instant coffee for how reproducible it is…

That’s just Slackware.

Local models are really good at tokenizing the text and figuring the intent in the user input. Not perfect, but much better than any possible regexps you can think of. And it’s a trivial operation you can run even on a CPU model.

The windows client does, yes. But I’ve found that to be fragile on occasions.

Technically, it does have a windows client. It’s just in various states of being broken.

Updates to DNS, yes. Not necessarily to your primary zone. In other words, you don’t need access to the name servers for your highly privileged example.com zone, only the nameservers for inconsequential.example.com. With the challenge delegation you can easily narrow the scope by CNAMEing the relevant _acme-challenge enries in your primary domain once. This not only removes the need for the validator to modify your primary zone, but also scopes what subdomains it can validate, too. So the blast radius decreases.

I, too, maintain several devices that insist on having the certificates (and keys, yuck) being fed to them by hand. I automated it all, because I don’t see why a human should be in a loop of copying the secret material. Automaton is good.

How complicated is it to have a CNAME? /s

You can delegate to isolated nameservers with DNS-01, there’s no need to have control over the primary zone: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/technical-deep-dive-securing-automation-acme-dns-challenge-validation