REST API best practice on handling errors

I'm wondering how should errors be handled on a REST API backend, internally. Say the user gives an incomplete request payload, fails validation, or looking for something that does not exist. We'll want to return 400 or 404 for those cases.

In some frameworks (only those that I have experience with), we do this by throwing exceptions (NestJS, Spring, etc). But on Go, there's the error returned by operation methods (validation, access to db) that can indicate the error (if err != nil) and we can bubble-up the err up to the controller level and have different handling for it (return some specific status, error message, etc).

My question is, which way (or if there's another preferred way) is the best to handle errors on a backend? The problem is throwing exceptions will show on any logs monitoring tools and will show that the app have so many errors even though most might be 4XX errors (we could filter the logs to find 50X errors definitely), and using the errors return object might be cumbersome to bubble-up for every validation functions we'd have. I'll be happy if there's any repository example or article that explains the similar topic.

Thanks!