Exactly. My understanding is the API accommodates the frontend data which accommodates the design which accommodates the users needs.

What a fullstack guy would do is irrelevant here, because if their requirements changed, they’d just redo it. It’s not about who does the job, but about where we end up at when the format becomes obsolete.

Likely scenario: backend formats data and moves on / gets busy elsewhere. Frontend changes, so that data is now required in a different format. Frontend decides to just reformat it at their side because of schedules. Now it’s a mess and nobody knows why.

The root of the problem is this stupid frontend/backend team division when it’s actually a single program. That’s where the idea of “let’s ask fullstack” comes from. But there’s no good answer this guy could give you, apart from “stop drawing stupid dividers across the whole”.

I agree. Sometimes it's easier to just return the record. It starts to suck when you get an array back and you have to loop through all n+1 results to query each additional record instead of just getting what you need in 1 request.