Can I use Identity Endpoints to login users and call protected APIs?

[akhanalcs]

I have a Blazor Server app that signs in users using AspNetCore.Identity (in .NET 8 RC2) using cookie authentication and need to call a protected API.
I'm currently calling the protected API using Api Key Authentication.

This is the full source code (it's a very simple implementation for a demo):
https://github.com/affableashish/blazor-identity-api
(Is my architecture good? Please give suggestions if there are ways I can improve it.)

My questions:

1. Can Identity Endpoints introduced in .NET 8 help me replace that Api Key Authentication with Token (Bearer) authentication?

   1. If yes, how would I do that?
      Like removing AspNetCore.Identity from my Blazor Server client app, create a new API that hosts Identity endpoints, call that Identity endpoints API to get token, claims, roles etc. of a user during login and use that to log in my users using cookie authentication from the Blazor Server client app, use the token I got from my previous call to call the protected API?

      The biggest difficulty I see with this (if it's even possible) is calling Identity endpoints and signing in the users in the Blazor Server client app. At this point I'd be redoing the effort that I can simply get out of the box if I use AspNetCore.Identity scaffolded into this Blazor Server client app, so I'm not sure if it's even worth it.

   2. If No, should I keep using Api Key authentication for calling my secured API?

      1. Is there a better way of doing this without having to go with an Identity server?
      2. Is using Identity Server the best way of calling protected APIs?

2. What are the practical use cases of Identity endpoints? Please provide an example.

[akhanalcs]

After reading these blog posts, I don't see much value in IdentityEndpoints in their current implementation.

https://andrewlock.net/exploring-the-dotnet-8-preview-introducing-the-identity-api-endpoints/
https://andrewlock.net/should-you-use-the-dotnet-8-identity-api-endpoints/
https://andrewlock.net/can-you-use-the-dotnet-8-identity-api-endpoints-with-identityserver/