Absolutely. For me, OpenResty combined with a custom Lua script solved an incredibly complicated business problem that I ran into a couple years ago, and now that arrangement serves thousands of complex requests per day. With Nginx and that custom code combined into a single configuration, not requiring a separate backend service, we turned a complicated problem into a very simple one!

I used OpenResty + Lua + Redis to implement a quick blacklist for an ad platform like 10 years ago. It really does make everything so simple and it's pretty fun to work with.