That's possible. WordPress and of course Yandex.ru use them, I think, almost exclusively (there may be a few edge cases where they need to use something else). That's a pretty sizable chunk of traffic right there.
I doubt it, because Google doesn't use nginx for anything public facing, and I'm pretty sure Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft don't either. That already counts for a huge chunk of internet traffic.
Nginx is good for relatively high traffic sites, but not so high traffic that you have entire teams of engineers rolling your own load balancing!
> Do you happen to know why they don't and what do they use?
Google originally used a modified version of Apache (and, as you have linked to, contributed a module to it), but my understanding is the Google Web Server is now so far removed from Apache it bears virtually no resemblance to it.
I wonder how much traffic are generated by this 16%? I would assume the traffic will be more than 16%, probably above 50%.