GoboLinux is incredibly interesting, along with GuixSD and NixOS, which are the three best things to happen in the Linux sphere I guess. GuixSD is my favourite, but it's full GNU, so I can't practically use it (missing drivers in kernel and maybe X, need to compile often). Nix has a funny language and systemd, so not really an improvement over Debian for me. Maybe I should try GoboLinux instead, but I'm afraid that there will be too many packages missing from it and IDK the story with security updates.

It is very much a hands on distro, for better or worse.

More akin to Gentoo than Arch, and far removed from the likes of CentOS or Debian Stable.

That said, rolling your own recipes is relatively straight forward. And with the /System/Index they are using these days, i think it should be less sensitive to hardcoded paths and similar idiocies.