Deploy Angular App w/ Proxy for One Route

Question

I have an Angular app w/ a proxy that's working well in local. There's one route that utilizes it with a Node API call.

Node.js

const express = require('express');
const api_service = require('./apiService');
const app = express();

app.get('/getData/:date', (req, res) => {
  const date = req.params.date;
  api_service.fetchData(...)
    .then(response => {
      res.json(response)
    })
    .catch(error => {
      res.send(error)
    })
})

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log("Server started in port 3000!");
});

Function in my Angular Service:

  fetchData(date: string) {
    const requestOptions: Object = {
      responseType: 'text',
    };
    this._http
      .get<string>('/api/getData/' + date)
      .pipe(
        map((data) => {
          this.result = data;
        })
      )
      .subscribe((data) => {
        this.mediaSource.next(this.result);
        if (Object.keys(this.result).length != 0) {
          this.history.push(this.result);
        }
      });
  }

proxy-prod.config.json

{
    "/api/*": {
        "target": "https://example.com",
        "secure": false,
        "changeOrigin": true,
        "logLevel": "debug",
        "pathRewrite": { "^/api": "" }
    }
}

proxy-local.conf.json

{
    "/api/*": {
        "target": "http://localhost:3000",
        "pathRewrite": {
            "^/api": ""
        },
        "secure": false,
        "changeOrigin": true,
        "logLevel": "debug"
    }
}

angular.json

 "serve": {
          "builder": "@angular-devkit/build-angular:dev-server",
          "options": {
            "browserTarget": "ui-dev:build",
            "proxyConfig": "proxy-local.conf.json"
          },
          "configurations": {
            "production": {
              "browserTarget": "ui-dev:build:production",
              "proxyConfig": "proxy-prod.config.json"
            }
          }
        },

ng serve works perfectly. ng serve --prod and ng build --aot --prod --output-hashing none do not.

The error I'm getting is:

headers: d, status: 200, statusText: 'OK', url: 'myexample.com', ok: false

I've tried this in my request but they cause errors too:

const headers = new HttpHeaders().set('Content-Type', 'text/plain; charset=utf-8');
{ headers, responseType: 'text'}

Been searching, testing, and dissecting code for many hours and not sure how to proceed. Can you anyone assist?

Thanks