https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-anywhere seems to be to the best of my judgment the current best practice in spinning up NixOS.

For a good implementation, my opinion, local should just be the special case of remote (i.e. ssh).

Hence, it might be an interesting feat to synthesize the two and implement nixos install as a reinterpretation of nixos-anywhere that also fully covers the nixos-install.sh use case.