You're perfectly correct, and Apache has and continues to serve as one of the most successful and widely deployed web servers to date. That said, in the context of more conveniently architecting for high volumes of traffic, Apache was conceived in a time of fundamentally different problems, and in that respect it can be viewed as a more antiquated option when scoping out the landscape of appropriate web server software.
I did not intend any pejorative connotations by calling it "archaic". I just wanted to emphasise that it has been eclipsed by newer software following different design paradigms better suited to this kind of problem.
If it works for you for now then no real need to change it. A proper deployment tool usually makes it easier to deploy apps of different types and languages using a consistent set of tools.
What I do when working with SSH'ing to AWS instances is to give them a readable name (like nginx-1, nginx-2) tag, and then place those names as hostnames in my /etc/hosts, so I can then just run ssh nginx-1. I use a script around https://github.com/bjeanes/ghost to automate this.
Great pointers, setup scripts and automating project chores are essential for creating a good workflow, saving time, and saving colleagues some hair when they get started with the app.
I've tried coffeescript but it didn't catch on with me. Perhaps I didn't give it enough time, but I got the feeling that it could get quite semantically ambiguous at times whereas if you stick to JS' native C-style form, the structure of the code is imperative and easy to follow. I also felt uneasy about what code was actually executing at the other end of the transpiler.