Yeah it’s hard, but we can help it. Besides, qubes user docs aren’t as comprehensive as some other sources.
I recommend reading Qubes Salt Beginner's Guide. It’s quite long but will help you get a grasp on salt and will get you through creating personal state configuration directories. Even if you don’t read all of it.
Talking specifically about package management with salt, you could check qubes salt examples by @zaz. It’s short, simple and has some cool ideas. See my-pkgs.top and my-pgks.sls
Having said that, you don’t actually need salt. Everything can be done with just bash or python or whatever. Or ansible.
Absolutely! I tried to highlight the main pitfall behind the idea itself, not specific implementation. Indeed, method of storing configuration does not really matter, because there is no guarantee that the same configuration will do the same thing across two distribution versions.
Same here. Debian is so good.