Interestingly, we extended the collectstatic command in many ways to perform minification, combination of assets, generation of sass and javascript variables (based on settings in python), etc. It's part of our deployment and if we were serving static files through django, we would still have to run a similar command.
I'm also happy that nginx is handling file uploads, aliasing, redirection, virtual hosting on different IPs and Ports with different access control, real ip extraction (when behind a load balancer), etc.
I'll be following more closely this trend of moving static asset hosting from a regular web server to the application container, but I believe that web servers like nginx and apache can do a lot more than just serving static files (at least, in complex deployment scenarios).