In earlier days a lot of people was under the impression that nginx was much faster for PHP, but that was not true. Apache with mod_php was faster, but the issue was memory consumption for non php files as the php module was loaded on every request, even if it wasn't php.
When using php-fpm you don't need the php module on every request as php-fpm is contacted as needed. This does increase latency and decrease performance for php requests, but the difference is indistinguishable for most people.
Slowloris attacks was/is one issue with non event-based webservers.
Both nginx and apache can handle a six digit number of php requests each second on a low end server. You application(Wordpress, Laravel) will without a doubt be a bottleneck before the webserver becomes the bottleneck.
But yeah, there was a lot of weird and misinformed reasons for why people recommended others to use nginx no matter what the use case was.
Now we are seeing the opposite backlash.
As someone who doesnt know much about this topic, I also wish there was an easy answer :/
I've since moved to Caddy, and uh, wow, this is what it's supposed to be like!
There's little reason to replace Apache completely, though.
With software packages such as nginx (in general, not in the context of Linux distributions mentioned above), it's sometimes easier / clearer to start with a completely empty configuration file, and add just enough to make it work (TDD-style), and / or stop it complaining. If you can explain / defend / justify the presence of every line, you stand a much better chance of knowing how it will behave.