I tend to agree with this perspective. It's not HTTP's responsibility to distinguish between infinite permutations of non-existing resources, only that the reso

I tend to agree with this perspective. It's not HTTP's responsibility to distinguish between infinite permutations of non-existing resources, only that the resource does or doesn't exist. Returning a 200 is counter-productive because now any sort of logging, metric system, or middleware is going to be ineffective unless you write some custom code to parse out the body and decode whatever custom error resource the developer decides to invent. And in that case why are you even using HTTP as a transport protocol in the first place if you're going to violate 30+ years of precedent.