You know, for most projects, I'd think that'd be pretty...bad. Given that nginx only recently got dynamic module support, I'm curious how many people are out there having grown to build it from source, letting them switch upstreams a bit more easily. perhaps. maybe.
Pretty much every major nginx deployment I’m familiar with has been from source. Dynamic modules aren’t really that new but certainly post-date a lot of deployments. But also bigger deployments tend to want full control of which in-tree modules are compiled into nginx, which dependencies they pull in (for security and deployment reasons), and how quickly patches and security releases can be updated.
It also has a fairly simple from-source deployment with a fairly solid build script.