[snowwrestler]

I think the idea is that if you count every single website on the web, a huge number of them are crappy little sites on shared hosting. Shared hosting usually relies on .htaccess rules, which are only valid under Apache.

Popular PHP CMS software also relies on .htaccess. Wordpress for example allegedly powers about a quarter of all websites, and auto-creates an .htaccess file when you enable pretty links, which basically everyone does. Drupal ships with multiple .htaccess files.

Sure it's possible to adapt this code into Nginx configuration, but there is really no reason to do that. It's far easier to set up Nginx in front of Apache and get most of the Nginx benefits that way.