As I understand, the popular consensus today is that nginx+php-fpm performs faster than apache even with the mpm_event process management enabled?

But when it comes to real world usage, many production instances I observe these days still deploy apache a lot. Even cpanel based web hosting (shared or dedicated instances) are more often apache based than nginx.

Is it due to some old habits and dependence on apache specific features like .htaccess support? Or is it the case that apache has actually caught up in the race with ngnix and the performance difference is quite negligible these days?