When switching from Windows, it was very confusing to me, that program files where all over the place. It was before (almost) every distro switched to the /usr directory, so it was even worse than it is now. Even now, when I understand more about Linux than before, I still prefer the Windows way.
I think that this hierarchy is nice for people moving from Windows, but experienced enough that they could understand the docs and tweak the OS.
I was actually surprised that this distro was designed with more experienced people in mind, I thought it was for beginners.
All of these distros strive to solve the problem with having multiple versions of libraries and programs coexisting without conflicts, but Gobo took a different approach. What Gobo doesn’t do is the declarative system configuration. In Nix you don’t need to worry about breaking your system because you can easily restore the previous version of your config. In traditional distros you would need to set up package manager hooks to make snapshots and create snapshots manually every time before changing something in /etc