Recompiling with the features you want is a great model for a free software project. So much simpler to write and maintain compared to a plugin system that it really makes more sense in a lot of cases.

That is a consequence of static linking, and an abandoned plugin package that hasn't yet been removed due to backwards compatibility.

People keep forgetting that with static linking they are back to 1980's IPC for application extensions, or building from scratch every time they need to reconfigure the application.

I've switched to using traefik from caddy. For simple use cases it's a little more verbose in the configuration, but for more involved things like multiple load balancing backends, rewriting paths and headers and so on I've found it really good.

nginx had this defect for a long time too!

Go doesn't support runtime linking, which is why "no plugins" (even though Go docs claim it does, no it doesn't).