Yeah, it's pretty common pattern. Especially if you're doing active frontend development as hot/auto-reloading of the page comes standard with all dev servers and it's generally what you want.

Serving your frontend through nginx for local development would work, but it's not very ergonomic. I know .NET has a built-in development server for frontend apps so you can use it in both prod and dev, but I think most frontend devs prefer the CDN option especially that it gives their delivery a performance boost and makes it completely independent of any backend.