Mods, you guys can close this, I found the solution.
The proxy was working as intended but wasn’t console logging the proper root. It kept defaulting to the index.html of React and showing http://localhost:3000/api/ instead of http://localhost:5000/api in the console. However, if I console logged the req on the backend in the Node server, the endpoint was getting hit in the terminal. Just a weird nuance here and if anyone has more information I’d like to know.