How well NixOS and Nixpkgs are maintained absolutely affects users of NixOS. This may have just saved NixOS from becoming an unmaintained or at best slowly maintained project that people advise against using for anything serious.

Just like Eelco's way of governing, it will likely have 0 effect on 99% of people using NixOS,

Flakes not being stabilized, or worked on by Eelco, despite him literally being the inventor absolutely has an effect on every single Nix user. The flakes-nonflakes aplit is part of why the documentation on nix is so poor. Some things only support one or the other, and it's a pain.

The aux fork of nix (which idk what's gonna happen to it) said they would stabilize the current implementation of flakes as v0. I hope this new council does the same, because it's been far too long. So much of the community uses flakes that's it's basically official, but it being "experimental" means they can't be mentioned in official docs, or included by default in the official installer. You have to edit a config file to enable flakes.

The worst part of this all, is that the Determinate Systems nix installer, only comes with flakes and no channels (old way) - and Eelco literally works for Determinate Systems. Despite all of this, flakes are still "experimental".

I hope things change. Flakes are legitimately better, a minor addition in complexity, in exchange for making it easy to reuse code. And finally having unified documentation and tooling (if flakes become the main way) will probably be the best benefit.

I really hope this council moves flakes put of their "experimental" status. If so, then democracy has spoken: the users want flakes.

Eelco is also leftist so no (this is said in the open letter) also the maintainers are what make nix be nix so yes, it's has the potencial to affect a lot of people and the link send explaining the situation has very good arguments(with proofs), that don't have any correlation with left or right, you need to give a good argument if you want people to belive in you