Websites that redirect you to a custom /404 page after you've typed their way too fucking long URL and misspelled a single word deserve to be nuked from orbit.
Holy fucking shit, why is this a thing? Has this ever helped ANYBODY?

Bad frameworks, bad devs, lazy fucks

I don’t want to tell you how many backend devs told me “but that’s way easier and already done”

Fuck off, dickheads

Of course it should be a custom 404 page so that you know at least which website you're on, and that you have the main navigation available!

Also, who types URLs manually these days?!

@Fast-Nop future versions of chrome (and their derivatives) will no longer show the sub domain and pathname, therefor, only the domain will be visible

@010001111 Yeah that's a reason why I'm using the www subdomain, but still redirect from the domain so that it also works without www.

Oh, and my 404 page has a cat, of course.

@Fast-Nop He means a dedicated 404 URL. So you type https://example.com/some-very-long-... and you get redirected to https://example.com/error404 and you can't fix it.

@gronostaj Aahhh ok, that's indeed stupid, not least because it's probably a soft-404 with wrong HTTP status code.

@gronostaj We all know this is a thing, so not doing a ^C before pressing enter is asking for trouble.

@gronostaj aaahhh, that's the piece I was missing!

Standard 404 pages? Not cool.
Custom 404 pages? Cool.
Super awesome custom 404 pages with animated css trains and things? Totally rockin’

Redirecting to a custom 404 page and nuking the offending url? Totally uncool.

Render, don’t redirect.

Yes, they both work, but one of them amounts to being a self-important prick to your users. Don’t be a self-important prick. It’ll also save you some trouble when someone sends a .docx containing a screenshot of your 404 page that doesn’t include the url because you were a self-important dummy that redirected instead of rendered.