My advice as a fellow long-time Apache user who also went deep into nginx would be to look into Caddy.
For me, the main draw to nginx was powerful (web) proxying, static file performance and simpler configs - Caddy does all of that 10x. In a sense, nginx is right in between Apache and Caddy, so unless I need to proxy something obscure like RTMP or email, I rarely have a use for it these days.
Indeed. I never got comfortable with Apache after 15 years of administering Linux systems. Configuring Apache is like setting up Postfix or Sendmail: it does not spark joy. NGINX was initially interesting, nowadays still requires a ton of boilerplate, and does everything and the kitchen sink. Lighttpd almost went the way of the dodo for similar reason I suspect.
HTTP is not new technology, nor rocket science, a web server to serve a simple HTML page should be configurable from scratch, from an empty .conf file, in seconds.