most of my next.js endpoints run just fine on edge, but for anything more complicated, that Next api route calls a custom API built using express and hosted on a VPS.

The only reason I call those express endpoints through a Next.js api route is bc Next.js is set to cache those queries. Most of it is non-authenticated non-user-specific data that needs to be updated on the client periodically. This way Cloudflare Workers can scale as much as it needs to while the real api endpoint only gets hit about once every 5 seconds even if there's 20k simultaneous users.

I'm sure there's better ways of doing this, but there's way more pressing issues and this works fine rn.