Difference between "location /" and Nginx default server block values

Question

What is the point of defining location / { } since, if I understand correctly this will match all potential URIs and "lose" any battle against a location with a more specific URI ? My reasonning is you can just put all default values directly into the server block instead of defining a location / { }.

Hence if I am correct, this serves no purpose :

server {
   root /www/html;
   location / {
      root /www/html;
   }

}

PS: I am quite new to nginx so feel free to tell me if I could phrase things better to make the question more useful/discoverable.

Answer 1

You are correct, your specific example serves no purpose. But there are a lot of nginx directives that don't work on server-level

for example:

server {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
}

^ this does not work.
v this does.

server {
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

Server-level directives are default values. There are directives that work only in server-level, there are directives work only on location-level.

Its two fundamentally different things, it's just that your example has the same consequences.