Need an expert opinion. Is it a good approach to use TestNG framework for building an automation suite for API?

I work on Selenium, I was wondering if it is a good approach to build an automation suite for APIs using TestNG framework?

Reason for my question is I am not sure if it is a good approach to API automation with tools like SOAP UI which makes lives much easier. But I also think it is a totally different approach than SOAP UI.

As I am no expert in API automation using Java. I felt there are various advantages of using TestNG framework in API automation because we could just send the required API endpoints and parameters via an external file and run our automation suite. Also with many json parsers we could validate our results.