[epc]

Out of paranoia I just checked and yeah, GoogleBot actual (and not the dozens of fakes) requested each 410'd URL at least once a month, some URLs get multiple requests per month. All have been marked 410 since 2014 or earlier.

[flir]

Google has FoMO...

[marcosdumay]

The webmaster tools used to say Google will punish your rank if the crawler gets too many 404 or 410...