I believe the approach provided by this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/61422022/602506 is better than the others.

What's the approach? In your @ExceptionHandler method simply call response.sendError() to set the response status which Spring Boot's BasicErrorController uses later when putting together the response. For example:

@ExceptionHandler(EmptyResultDataAccessException.class)
public void handleEntityNotFoundException(EmptyResultDataAccessException e, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {
    response.sendError(HttpServletResponse.SC_NOT_FOUND);
}

Why is this better?

• the response body will have the same format as any other exception handled by Spring, via the behavior of DefaultErrorAttributes (or your customized ErrorAttributes, if you provided one)

• it still obeys Spring configuration properties such as server.error.include-exception and server.error.include-stacktrace, as well as query-parameter based controls such as ?trace=true

• it works with any exception class, including exceptions from libraries which you therefore cannot annotate with @ResponseStatus