Do links from third-party resources that generate 404 errors affect?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Good afternoon!
I would like to clarify the question, let's say we have a site that has completely different addresses:
/catalog/
/catalog/?PAGEN_1=2
/catalog/section_code/
/catalog/section_code/?PAGEN_1=
2 there was a 404 page (supposedly from other sites they can make such links on purpose, and the search robot will lower the issue)
We made a 404 code, but left the page just empty, as if the goods were not found
Seoshnikov insist that the search robot crawls even 404 pages and you need to it looked exactly like a rendered 404 page (in this context, this is not so easy to do)
Additional caveat: There are no links to these pages from our site, so the user will not get to them.
As a result, the question is: are the SEOs right or not?

Answer 1

Google will write in the Search Console if you try to return 200 instead of 404, and it does not like this, so try to set the right 404