Maybe this will help?
https://kjac.dev/posts/delivery-api-tip-trick-and-hack/
We've been trying to do something similar in Umbraco 15
Seems to be a bit of a need around this, we run headless and there's no easy way to get parent / child node without going around the houses.
For example at the moment, we're trying to figure out how to generate a breadcrumb from the API, the only way is to hack around the 'path'