My first post exposed a problem with my static s3 bucket setup. I could access my /blog routes through navigation from my landing page, but when attempting to directly access the blog route(s) that I added, /blog - or any non-index route would return a 404. After some brief googling, stack overflowing, etc. I found that react routing all is actually handled within index.html - thus it is giving the appearance of going to /blog/main but in reality we're still hitting index.html.
Following the instructions from a write-up about s3 and react routing didn't work for me. After some more research, I found out that there is a configuratble error page in the s3 bucket's static hosting properties. I updated it to point to index.html instead of what appeared to be a defaulted error.html.
I'm no longer receiving a 403 or 404 when accessing the route directly, but it is simply redirecting to my landing page and NOT to the requested route. I'm not sure if it is a NextJS-specific problem because this supposedly should work with react routing, more to come...