Hey friend!

In terms of performance and sustaining high traffic, Nginx wins every time. It's been that way for a while now, not quite one of those things that goes back and forth every month or so. Whether it's a base install or both are tweaked for max performance, in any situation where it's a 1:1 comparison, Nginx pulls ahead.

As for the .htaccess thing, I'm not sure I share the linked perspective. You need your basic rewrites and perhaps some additional ones to accommodate a good caching plugin. You should be able to find those in template form with light Google searching. Beyond that, I really have never met a plugin that wrote new items to .htaccess that I also recommended to people. There are a lot of very popular Wordpress plugins that I don't like, and I think you can get along fine without. Security plugins being one of them. I'll take http auth on wp-login any day, lightweight solution and additional security had by all.

Moving back to web server choices. There is, of course, more to life than benchmarks. When a visitor hits your page and it loads in an acceptable amount of time to not cause them to want to leave, performance is fine. As long as you're not running Apache with Prefork MPM, most people see no issue based on the web server itself. I use Apache and Caddy, I never use Nginx. I know it's the best, and I don't use it. I just don't like the configuration syntax. I don't need it, it isn't my preference, so I don't use it. Caddy sytnax speaks to me:

domain.tld {
        root /var/www/html
        log /var/log/caddy/domain.log
        errors /var/log/caddy/domain_errors.log
        gzip
        fastcgi / /run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock php {
                ext .php
                split .php
                index index.php
        }
}

So never forget that you have choices. Use what you want unless you need something else. Make it as enjoyable for you as it can be, you're the one that has to wake up at 3AM and fix it so it might as well represent your style.

Jarland