Axios is it slower to auto catch error responses such as 404

Question

Just out of curiosity, the default setting for the axios package in javascript, node, or any other language is to throw an error for any response 400 or larger (I'm not sure if that's precisely correct, but meh). I've learned in the past that it's generally bad practise to use catch when an if statement would have sufficed. In order to answer my issue, would it be preferable to use an if statement rather than a catch in situations where 404 errors are anticipated to occur frequently (for the package axios, this entails changing the default settings for validateStatus)?

Things to think about: Does using AWS Lambda make a difference? Is it different for various JavaScript/browser/Node versions?

I would appreciate any advice: