API Testing w/Schema Validation

So our company is going to be breaking up a big monolithic service into microservices and I think this is a perfect time to start implementing API testing on these microservices as they are broken up. I'll preface that I am a new Automation Architect to the company and the company didn't really have much automation to begin with (so pretend im starting sort of at square 1).

I've used Playwright in the past for API testing and it worked well (even if it's probably heavier than whats needed). I created client classes to match microservices to make testing easier. However there is no sort of schema validation on these tests.

With these new microservices it'll give the development team time to define what the schema is going to be (Since a lot of these request/response body schemas haven't been defined due to the code being very old and not well documented).

Anyways, I thought this is maybe the time to start implementing some sort of schema validation with the tests we will write. This is in TypeScript (at least Playwright is) so keeping that in mind I see a few options out there (And would also love advice). The backend services are a mixture of C# and C++ I believe but most of the QA engineers use JS/TS.

  1. Use some sort of Schema generator/parser and validator. Something like https://ajv.js.org/ but im not sure on a generator and honestly im not an expert on TypeScript specifically (More used to JS) so im a little lost as to whats out there.
  2. Use something like Pact.js or some sort of Pact testing. I've only ever heard of PactJS but i've not done Pact testing before. Seems like maybe a heavy lift but i've not heard one way or the other.
  3. Just don't bother with it (I've heard people suggest that maintaining the schemas is really time consuming if there is a lot of flux) so maybe it's not "really" worth it.
  4. Other ideas??