Yeah, I could never get NPM to work right on my system either. I use the NGINX Docker image and set up my certs manually.
If I were to do it all over again today, I would probably go with Caddy since it now has a bunch of that stuff built in with automatic HTTPS by default and the basic reverse proxy setup is literally 2 lines of code.
I was born in 1995, people are split on whether that’s millennial or gen Z. I guess I’ll round up and go gen Z. I have siblings born in the early '80s though so I watched a lot of older TV/movies and used a few late '80s to early '90s toys, games, and electronics.