I do the same with content but I also have my config also broken out into
config/_default/languages/languages.en.yml
config/_default/languages/languages.es-mx.yml
Due to the sheer number of languages. The problem is data being used on more than one page but also needing to be used across multiple languages. Digging through the stacks got me to this article:
https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/multilingual-only-for-data-folder/17050
I should probably refactor to set my data folders by language first.
The one alternative I’ve actually been looking at is perhaps using another instance of Hugo so that I can use posts (which support multilingual by default) as an API similar to what @regis used here: Build a JSON API With Hugo’s Custom Output Formats
The only problem with this would be having to maintain two repos not one and it simply isn’t that large a volume of data.