Ive seen this a few times in the past but for a different reason. What would happen in these cases was that internally there’d be some cascade of calls to microservices that all get collected. In the most egregious examples it’s just some proxy call wrapping the “real” response.
So it becomes entirely possible to get a 200 from the thing responding g to you but it may be wrapping an upstream error that gave it a 500.
Sometimes I wish HN supported emojis so I could reply with the throw-up one.