Apache feels like a forgotten gem in the ops world. Everyone moved onto Nginx and at some point will run into some use-case that needs a feature that's only in Nginx+. And since Nginx+ is so expensive people end up just patching the OSS Nginx with the modules they need. But that whole time Apache was there with every conceivable battery and feature already included.
Except its configuration language is awful. Nginx is pretty bad too, and then there's Caddy which seems the most tolerable so far. Usability matters quite a lot!
It is probably fairly easy to create a fork of Apache with a better configuration language. The fact that no such fork exist (or more precisely, the fact that you don't mention it, which is strong evidence that you know of no such fork) is evidence that most Apache users are OK with or roughly indifferent toward its conf language. (I know nothing of it.)
I, too, believe that usability matters a lot, and I'm curious what you think of bash.
Or it could be evidence of Apache's configuration language being closely tied into its internal implementation in a spaghetti-code way! If there's one fundamental truth in open source, it's that maintaining things is hard, doubly so when it's a fork of a complex system that few people fully understand. The absence of a fork does not mean users are satisfied, simply that the people who might be motivated to fork have better alternatives for their time (for instance, learning Nginx).
I'm not very fond of it, to put it lightly. You can get some things done quickly in it, I'll admit, but anything past a few hundred lines quickly becomes unmaintainable.
