I survived without errors from being to HN front page with Nginx and a static site (made with Hugo, iirc) on a Linode 1GB (when the plan was still existing). No CDN whatsoever.
That sounds reasonable to me. In the old days people used Apache because it was available and worked. But because the performance was shit they adopted other complex means of dealing with heavy loads. Nginx has dramatically improved the web server performance problem but a lot of old practices are still in place.