With REST 404s due to missing resources (non-existing ID), you should generally get corresponding error information in the body (as also described in TFA), and clients should log/display that information. That should make enough of a difference. There’s a lot of “should” here, of course, but instead of teaching developers to not use 404, it would be better to teach them to create and handle error responses appropriately.
I really feel like you're ignoring the whole point, which is that this is about helping you out when things go wrong. Yes, it'd be great if we could teach people to never write bugs and that they should always check the response body, but that's just not what happens in reality. Being able to immediately differentiate the problem based on the response code is very useful when you get a bug submitted from someone saying they get a 404 and it doesn't work.
