[harshreality]

You would run into the same situation with contractors who used apache, if they didn't know apache very well.

Returning status codes from nginx is easy. Adding headers is easy. Perhaps you could elaborate about "certain things handled easily by Apache's large ecosystem of modules".

Apache's large ecosystem of modules is built around doing everything in the webserver. More often these days, that stuff is handled by a dynamic application. Nginx talks to those via fastcgi, scgi, uwsgi, or plain http proxying. Nginx does not need to know anything about how the apps do whatever it is they do.