I encountered this type of architecture in one of our company's internal services. At first I thought the developers just didn't know about other status codes, but now I read this and I can see there is some rationality behind it.
My take is that this kind of architecture might be fine for personal applications, but once you start working with other people this can get infuriating very fast (I know I was). Others already mentioned why this would be a bad idea (caching, etc.), but for me the most important thing is that it's not conventional. I don't know of any open source web framework that handles http statuses this way out of the box. If someone does please comment so I can have a look.
My take is that this kind of architecture might be fine for personal applications, but once you start working with other people this can get infuriating very fast (I know I was). Others already mentioned why this would be a bad idea (caching, etc.), but for me the most important thing is that it's not conventional. I don't know of any open source web framework that handles http statuses this way out of the box. If someone does please comment so I can have a look.