nginx config increasingly feels like a bunch of foot guns waiting to go off for me.
For smaller projects, I've really enjoyed Caddy's "best practice by default" approach to webserver/loadbalancer config where you can generally only choose to remove best practices, not try to build them up from scratch. Has SSL and LetsEncrypt enabled by default, etc. This avoids a lot of the pitfalls of incorrect webserver config altogether, keeps the configuration file really small and easy to read. I wish this style of config was more common.
Also, this is a bit of a personal preference, but v1 Caddy felt like maybe a bit easier to get started with than v2 Caddy, though sadly was abandoned. I'm sure that there were good reasons for doing it, but the few forks that started out from it with the intent to maintain it never really went everywhere, so v2 is the only possibility nowadays, unless you want to maintain it yourself or like dead software: https://github.com/WedgeServer/wedge
Of course, that's not a criticism of Caddy itself, just how we as an industry sometimes need rewrites and that makes us keep up with the churn.