I see so many posts and people who run NGINX as their reverse proxy. Why though? There’s HAProxy and Apache, with Caddy being a simpler option.
If you’re starting from scratch, why did you pick/are you picking NGINX over the others?
HAproxy cannot serve static files directly. You need a webserver behind it for that.
Apache is slow.
Nginx is both a capable, fast reverse-proxy, and a capable, fast webserver. It can do everything HAproxy does, and what Apache does, and more.
I am not saying it is absolutely best for every use-case, but this flexibility is a large part of why I use it in my infra (nad have been using it for a decade).