Well you’re really feeding my Nix confirmation bias here. I used to use Ansible with my dot files to configure my personal computers to make it easy to get set up on a new machine or server shell account. But it wasn’t great because I would have to remember to update my Ansible config whenever I installed stuff with my OS package manager (and usually I did not remember). Then along came Nix and Home Manager which combined package management and configuration management in exactly the way I wanted. Now my config stays in sync because editing it is how I install stuff.
Nix with either Home Manager or NixOps checks all of the benefits you listed, except arguably using a “known” programming language. What are you waiting for?
LEDs should last for tens of thousands of hours. There may have been a manufacturing defect in OP’s case.