There are cases when performance is not your main focus but simplicity of use is. Like during development. I'd of course never use this in production, but it's perfect for my development needs.
I agree with the sentiment, but using nginx as a proxy is reasonably easy (at least after you make one that works and can reuse that configuration.)
The advantage of developing on as similar a platform to the projected production platform is that when you do deploy to a real environment, there are fewer nasty surprises.
How easy is it to use nginx for dynamic proxying? Wondering, because the need I have is to be able to dynamically route requests to ephemeral flask apps that could be on a different host/port at any given moment. Not my design BTW, but it's what I need to do.
The thought was to have node manage the flask processes and another tracker service which would dynamically proxy to the apps. Can nginx provide this? Forgive my ignorance, just new to the concept of dynamic proxying.
nginx is just a web server so it doesn't have dynamic programming capabilities. However, if you wanted to do something like that from nginx you could script it in Lua using OpenResty https://github.com/openresty/
It is not reasonably easy, I can't set it up completely with "git clone" and it does not stay inside the project (that's an issue when your developers use a huge variety of operating systems with varying installed and configured software). That means a lot of time lost during problem solving with the hundreds of developers I work with, most of them have never even heard about nginx, they're developers, not sysadmins.
There absolutely should not be any nasty surprises with switching a reverse proxy, and you can cover that with end to end tests. Such issue would be a bug in the reverse proxy.
Of course there are things like Docker, but that implies performance issues on Mac.
The advantage of developing on as similar a platform to the projected production platform is that when you do deploy to a real environment, there are fewer nasty surprises.