I agree with you that they're more or less equal. I don't like the idea of my reverse proxy dealing with letsencrypt for me, personally, but that's just a preference.
One tricky thing about nginx though, from the "If is evil" nginx wiki [0]:
> The if directive is part of the rewrite module which evaluates instructions imperatively. On the other hand, NGINX configuration in general is declarative. At some point due to user demand, an attempt was made to enable some non-rewrite directives inside if, and this led to the situation we have now.
I use nginx for homelab things because my use-cases are simple, but I've run into issues at work with nginx in the past because of the above.
I'm not sure why Apache is so unpopular, it can also function as a reverse proxy and doesn't have the weird configuration issues nginx has.
Some people take this way too far, for instance I've send places compiling (end of life) modsec support into nginx instead of using the webserver it was built for