How? It so much cleaner and simpler than Apache. I don't get this sentiment.
But I suspect for people who do it more seriously, then it's nginix config hits the sweet spot. To me the language seems sophisticated, well documented and fairly well behaved if you pay attention to the rules.
That's can make it too hard for someone casually trying to quick-start some experimental project. But it's exactly what you want if you are maintaining a long-lived set up that is likely to grow and become complicated over time.
This is not'nginx'. You can't sit and write this off because Apache did something similar ten years ago. The build in API alone is worth exploring.
Their eventing/threaded mpm is basically nginx.
And now nignx is starting to gain the features of apache.