Protected Populate | Strapi Market)
Does both tasks if you in the config set auto-populate to true. and don’t populate at all. aka http://localhost:1337/api/pages/8
Only goos 1 layer deep relation wise that is why you need to populate multiple layers deep manually.
You can do this by hand like they show in the article.
Use protected populate to have full control over what you want to populate with (auto-populate=true)
or a 3rd option is GitHub - Barelydead/strapi-plugin-populate-deep: A Strapi plugin that makes it easier to populate deep content structures Note that this will lead to performance issues in production since it populates a lot more invisible things you can’t see.