Why, yes. Imagine you are in flow, and you want to show a file to nginx, but you can't. Better give root (and user) rights to nginx when you set up your system.
Very few computers running nginx have human user accounts with more than dotfiles in the home directory. Meanwhile desktops run everything on the same account because defining usable security policies between users is basically impossible.
Sure, in production. I don’t think that’s generally true though. It’s pretty common for developers to run an http server for test purposes. But anyway, that was just an example. I could have said cups.
