I also use next and use the pages router. Makes for a development friendly react front end. And I have some use cases where I want to have a headless crm/api “

I also use next and use the pages router. Makes for a development friendly react front end. And I have some use cases where I want to have a headless crm/api “hidden” behind the front end. So in these cases using next as a backend proxy works well for me.