Corporate-starter does not populate, but gets deep nested response

I tried the GitHub - strapi/nextjs-corporate-starter: Strapi Demo application for Corporate Websites using Next.js template and it works great. The home page is fetched via http://localhost:1337/api/pages?filters[slug]=home&locale=en . According to populate documentation it should get only the first level of data, but gets a deep nested structure. How is this possible?

  "data": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "attributes": {
        "shortName": "Home Page",
        "slug": "home",
        ...
        "locale": "en",
        "contentSections": [
          {
            "id": 1,
            "__component": "sections.hero",
            "title": "Strapi [Starter] with Next JS",
            "description": "This is build with [Strapi] and [Next] JS. A match made in heaven.",
            "picture": {
              "data": {```

<i>This topic has been created from a Discord post (1229752540074344459) to give it more visibility.
It will be on Read-Only mode here.
<a href="https://discord.com/channels/811989166782021633/1229752540074344459/1229752540074344459">Join the conversation on Discord</a></i>

I think I found it, but do not understand it yet: page-populate-middleware.js seems to populate stuff backend side.