I agree. That, and the sane defaults are almost always nearly perfect for me. Here is the entire configuration for a TLS-enabled HTTP/{1.1,2,3} static server:
something.example.com {
root * /var/www/something.example.com
file_server
}
That's the whole thing. Here's the setup of a WordPress site with all the above, plus PHP, plus compression:
php.example.com {
root * /var/www/wordpress
encode
php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php-version-fpm.sock
file_server
}
You can tune and tweak all the million other options too, of course, but you don't
have to for most common use cases. It Just Works more than any similarly complex server I've ever been responsible for.