There are probably thousands on Github for the use of teeth-cutting like in the blogpost. I've made one. You just lose interest when you impl the easy/naive stuff and need to actually use a real solution in production.
Apache's httpd is perfectly good as a web server, and passable as a proxy. I can't say that it'd be my first choice, but I'm not aware that there's any special reason not to use it.
The Byzantine config file syntax was a common complaint shared by the early defectors to nginx. If I never have to edit that conf file again it will be too soon.
Apache, nginx, haproxy, envoy, traefik, and probably dozens more that aren't on the top of my head.