You don't need nixos for that. The only thing you lose is rolling back system configuration, unless you use system-manager.
Unless you're doing scientific computing, or being a sysadmin for a company, you don't actually need nixos. It's at that scale that system reproducibility becomes important enough to offset the downsides. For everyone else, home-manager and a list of packages are more than enough.
The learning curve is not that bad, it's just that the resources are a pile of burning garbage.
Also, idk what you're doing with VLC, but ~/.config should still work AFAIK.