This wasn't a question about having a functional webserver or not. It was a conscious decision against running code without reading it first. The "run but don't read" strategy belongs into ports, not base. Hence nginx moved to ports.

Forking nginx was actually discussed when a proposed nginx update diff was too large for proper review. Tons of complex regex parsing code was added with nobody willing to go through it all in detail.

The forking option was quickly dismissed. The tipping point happened when someone (reyk?) pointed out that relayd had most of the guts of a complete web server anyway, including OpenBSD-style privsep which has to be bolted on to virtually all software imported from elsewhere, including nginx. It took about a week from that discussion happening to having a relayd-based functional and peer-reviewed web server in base (+ a couple of months of shaking out a few bugs and adding minor features).