Next.js already thinks in cache. The mistake is leaving that cache in one region. Cloud CDN should hold /_next/static and shareable HTML at 210+ PoPs, with purge on deploy or revalidate.
Hashed static files are the easy win
/_next/static and fonts are immutable. Long TTL, ignore query strings, never purge unless you reuse a filename (you should not).
This alone improves LCP for returning and new sessions once the HTML references those hashes.
ISR and anonymous SSR
If a page is identical for every anonymous visitor, cache the HTML (and shareable RSC payload) at Cloud CDN. Revalidate or deploy should purge those URLs so you do not wait on TTL.
Draft mode, preview tokens and cookie-personalised App Router trees must bypass. If middleware sets a shopper cookie on every HTML response, you cannot cache that HTML as public.
Images
You can keep the Next image optimizer as origin and cache its output, or point public images at Cloud CDN transformation and skip some origin resize work.
Either way the public hostname should be the CDN, not the Node process.
Hosting does not have to change
Self-hosted Node, a container or another host can all be the origin. Cloud CDN is the public edge. Validate on a test hostname including a preview URL that must not be cached.