Only said dude also happened to be the son of the CEO so everyone was forced to use it and a large marketing team would be put together and bankrolled to make everyone else use it.
If you can't do that then taking a simple approach (pulling in the libraries you need) makes more sense
My experience with Next.js is that it's an order of magnitude slower than Angular and makes it very easy to make massive security blunders (I have more than once found developers accidentality sending secrets to the browser).
That's a massive foot-gun.
Angular, out of the box, is focused on code which runs on the client. Yes you can do some tricks where some code is executed on the server, however the logical model stays the same: it's frontend code. So you wouldn't put tokens which you know belong in a BFF anywhere near it.
This is also no worse than literally any SSR tool that's ever existed, going back to the CGI days.
Yeah no, it isn't safe-by-default. I caught a frontend team shipping keys in the frontend code. Cause? Typo and using default templates which built-on-deploy.