> In 2024 people are more likely to turn the cloud knob up to pay for throughput (if they need it) and save on dev time with the comparably better dev ex that caddy offers.

This seems like a weird trade off to me.

The "learning tax" is really only paid once with nginx. Once you understand how it works and configured a reasonably end-to-end example with it then you can carry that over to your next project with minimal changes.

I've hosted countless Flask, Django, Rails, etc. apps over the years and very little changes on the nginx side of things. I'd rather learn this tool once and have better runtime performance all the time across all projects.

With that said, the performance difference probably won't be very noticeable for most sites but still, I personally wouldn't want to give in to running a less efficient solution when I know a more efficient solution exists right around corner that requires no application code changes to use -- just a little elbow grease to configure nginx once. This is especially true when nginx has a ~20 year track record of stability and efficiency.