@Scott I went through all of your questions historically and never once have you asked for help with Nginx in this context, or any other. I'm confused as to how we got to the point of abandoning the stock approach to start down a path that was guaranteed to lead to despair, when you didn't even ask for casual community assistance. Had you asked, any number of us could have just posted our "just works" configuration files; which we just did.
I'm not trying to be overly harsh, but it feels like you sabotaged this process from the beginning. You didn't ask the community for guidance on the best approach to take, nor ask how those of us have it working got it working, you didn't ask for help on how to make that process work, and only asked for help once you had decided you wouldn't accept help and "demanded" that only approaches that are extra hard and/or impossible would be considered. You also claimed that getting this working on Windows was easier than Linux, which can only be stated if you at least got it fully working on Windows, but you implied that you could not get it working at all.
So this feels like you posted to disparage the Linux and/or Nginx approaches, but didn't even really try with any earnest. Not even the most casual first step of asking how others had done it. If you were really trying to make this work, why didn't you ask for advice and help? This would have been a really easy thing to have helped with, had you wanted us to find a solution for you. And you glommed really quickly onto the discussion on Linux or Windows, which was unrelated to your issue and affected you not at all, as if it was core to your problem and some kind of frustration - which makes it doubly feel like you were setting us up to look unhelpful, when you never really gave us the slightest option to be of assistance.