[nitrogen]

Together, these forces combined to drive some APIs to respond with a 200 for any response.

I once had to work on such an API, which was designed that way because of similar limitations in the (third-party?) iOS networking library used by the app that connected to the API (as it was in 2013, anyway).

One can see how thinking of an HTTP request as an RPC rather than a REST request/response would justify throwing an error instead of returning an object, but since REST is now more common than RPC, one would at least expect an option not to throw.