At HAProxyConf last month, a lot of the community members presenting on stage explained why they chose HAProxy over alternatives like Nginx. Benchmark performance was a big part of it, but so was the community. LinkedIn said they compared HAProxy with Nginx, Envoy, and Zuul, and chose HAProxy because of the open-source model, the roadmap and release cycle, and all the features available in the non-Enterprise version. You can see some of their slides and performance benchmark results in this conference recap: https://www.haproxy.com/blog/haproxyconf-2022-recap/
Disclosure: I am part of the HAProxy team.