@lrvick Hi! I’m not sure what the “GNU way of doing things” is but Guix has a long track record regarding #bootstrapping and #ReproducibleBuilds and is used in production:
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/tags/bootstrapping/
(The “like no distro before it” punchline on the stagex home page is… questionable.)
That said, it’s good news that more distros are joining Guix and live-bootstrap on this journey!