Apache is weird. I'd imagine it's probably the most web server on the planet? Maybe second to nginx but it hasn't really mattered much for a long time. Guess it's probably b/c most ppl aren't configuring it themselves anymore and have moved on to different hosting setups.
I mostly reach for nginx as well, but apache2 is awfully nice for certain cases where you really do just want a simple, batteries-included setup for some task. I hit one of these a few years ago when I set up a code search tool at my org and the IT department wanted a reverse proxy in front of it that would do basic auth against our AD/LDAP backend.
On nginx, this was going to require either recompiling the whole server to enable to some non-default module, or delegating the auth to a separate script/process that appeared like it was going to be painful to set up, or implementing the whole thing in lua. On Apache, it was a 10 line config file and I've never had to think about it again.
(And yes, I know the article is about the ASF and not httpd, but I just wanted to respond to this comment in particular.)
