Creating overlays on nixpkgs is fairly trivial. There was a bug a couple of weeks ago with yt-dlp, which was fixed in the nightly version. But even today the new version is not yet available in nixpkgs-unstable. Did I wait all this time with a broken yt-dlp? No! I created a derivation that overrides the git commit of the original yt-dlp, and added it as an overlay to nixpkgs. Once nixpkgs has the newer version, I'll remove the overlay and customized derivation. This is a 5-lines-of-code change. You don't have to use flakes if you don't want to, it works without flakes as well.

Now compare the above with how you would customize a version in other systems, like Debian with apt-pkgs ...