Hey all,
Sorry I haven’t replied but I was able to solve my problem. I ended up having to host my api online and use that as my baseURL. My guess is it has to do with how Netlify containerizes everything and thus localhost gets funky - they are trying to access their own localhost, not what I have on my computer.
I ended up using https://ngrok.com/ to quickly host my api online, generate the pages on deployment, then drop the ngrok server. Took about 3 minutes to setup and get going.