I'm sorry, my lack of understanding it was supposed to be apparent in that post, and indeed you clarified that it's actually more the second scenario I hinted at. I was responding to people talking specifically about an underlying language making system calls and that not making said system calls from the language itself would keep you safe.

You're confirming the suspicion that I had. To wit:

"for this to be a 10/10 issue, it has to mean that processing the header files in Nginx/Apache results in some buffer overflow or for those values to be directly fed to bash."

Not a buffer overflow, but if those headers are being fed upwards into bash, that's what we're both talking about.