You need to be more precise. Do you have an existing web socket server and have questions how to connect on the client-side or do you have questions how to build a web socket server?

My questions is more, what would people recommend for setting up server-client WS connections. I know how to build the WS server, but I wasn't sure if there was a more out-of-the-box solution NextJS provided

No because Next is primarily designed to be hosted serverless and doesn't cover any features for long running processes.

I personally just host a server using soketi and use the pusher SDKs with it.