You seem to not be a fan of it, do you have a feature-complete replacement?

For example, Nginx's standpoint on htaccess is basically "find yourself another web server" (https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/l...). I don't fancy giving users access to /etc/nginx and the power to reload the config just to add aliases on their own subdomains. Much better if they can add password protection to a directory by themselves. It also breaks that each site can live in its own project directory: without htaccess, if I copy over a project I would also have to modify my global nginx config to set per-directory (or at least per vhost) aliases, error pages, etc. Right now, I can say that deploying a project is "download the directory into the desired location and configure your database credentials and a pepper in the config.php". No global configuration changes are ever needed, the global config only does global stuff: tls ciphers, fallback error pages, compression, log files, and more such things.

And that's ignoring the fact that, even if there was some objectively better web server, I'd have the task of rewriting a decade of htaccess files into their fancy new format while Apache2 is still alive and properly supported.