Nginx config seems like a bottomless pit. It gives me the painful feeling that no matter what I have done with it, there's some security or performance issue still there.
Does this mean I should just stick with a more managed solution? Or is this a common feeling that I should just learn to live with? For my fun projects I use Caddy with mostly default settings.
I wouldn't be that worried about it. Sure there are ways to optimize it more and squeeze every drop of juice out the grape, but most of the time you're gonna be just fine. It might be the difference between running an extra app server or not.
Now that said nginx website has a ton of great examples. You can usually copy/paste them into whatever you need pretty easily, and once it's done it's not likely to change. I would especially do this if nginx is your internet-facing load balancer and has multiple upstreams behind it. Plenty of good examples out there.
Does this mean I should just stick with a more managed solution? Or is this a common feeling that I should just learn to live with? For my fun projects I use Caddy with mostly default settings.