Apache has served my purposes fine. I've used nginx in some cases, mostly when it was already configured, but I personally have not yet found a strong reason to prefer one over the other (and I would suggest that this is probably another case of overblown hype, and that Apache probably continues to work perfectly fine for most use cases).
I mostly continue to use Apache because I'm more familiar with its syntax, but it sounds like nginx is popular for use cases that we've just used purpose-fit applications like haproxy to fill.
Of course.
I don't know how you would even do shared hosting with nginx, as I don't think it has a .htaccess equivalent, and restarting the server for everyone else wouldn't be acceptable
I mostly continue to use Apache because I'm more familiar with its syntax, but it sounds like nginx is popular for use cases that we've just used purpose-fit applications like haproxy to fill.