I love the OpenResty nginx distribution (which is used by the official Kubernetes ingress-nginx). Makes most of the things you'd have to pay for with the normal nginx free.
Ability to do basically control and rewrite all your ingress AND egress and have some state via Redis over UNIX sockets.
What's not to love? After all, it's what powers the bulk of internet.
Granted, it sounds dreamier than it is, since a lot of the contraptions you could come up with might be better placed at application layer. But having operational ability to do these things ad-hoc, security advantages of manipulating at your own infra edge or performance boosts, sure does come in handy!