At the time time there was no commercial Nginx, only open source. Also, Apache was a huge pain to configure for anything other than configuring static files. Nginx config was a delight to deal with by comparison.
Yes - this. Building my first web site (we didn't call them apps back then) and wrangling with Apache and OpenSSL to enable encryption was ... not fun.
Tried Caddy yet? They provide really compact configuration templates and if needed can be reconfigured using the API.