yeah fly by night eng orgs sure, if you're DO your eng maturity (esp at this point) should be such that choices are being made knowingly, eyes open about future maintenance burden might be. If an api gateway is a foundational component at DO and having more control of it in golang is more important than getting long tail learnings for free building on top of nginx thats cool. If its a big important thing than building it up from lower level is useful bc then I know how to form it into the thing that I need when all the new requirements come in, harder to do that with nginx.. but i might get hurt less along the way with nginx.

i guess the tl;dr is, mature eng org shouldn't have too many dark corners for mushrooms that are important to grow, and nginx+lua choice or straight golang choice should be made informed either way.. as always.. tradeoffs! =)