If you think about it, any response you get is a "200" by that definition since the server successfully gave you...something. The browser usually has no specia

If you think about it, any response you get is a "200" by that definition since the server successfully gave you...something. The browser usually has no special handling for most response codes, so serving a 404 page with a 404 status code is fine/expected and lets things (browser, scraper, etc) respond appropriately. I don't think the browser treats it specially but if you were scraping, you'd obviously want to ignore that result. It is frustrating to work with APIs that return something like 200 { meta: { status: 404 message: "field <x> not found" } } and browsing is no different.