Exactly, this why if I use next.js I always hijack the api routes and use Elysia, it comes with something called eden that makes the typing e2e fantastic, can't recommend it enough.

As a side note, I'm slowly moving out of Next.js, as you said, is bloated, full of stuff that is just noise and that benefits them (more network requests more money) for little user benefit.

Right now for me the gold standard is Vite + Tanstack Router. (And Elysia for api/server, but thats unrelated).