404'ing bad links?

Hey! New here...

I just came across this Webmaster Central thread where John Mueller said:

"To be clear, I have never seen a case where bad links pointing to URLs that return 404 have ever caused a website any noticeable problem in web-search. 404s are a part of the internet, they're expected to be seen when a non-existent URL is crawled, there's no reason that I can think of where it would make sense to count 404s against a site."

Sooo... if you are looking at an expired domain for a PBN and it has a page or two with some shit links to it, could you simply not recreate that page and be off the hook? Anyone have experience with this?

[Edit] Not allowed to post links yet You can find the thread in Google...

I guess whole domain would be affected if you got really shit links. Depends what you mean by shit links. I pointed gsa on moneysite but never experienced the true shit links (so i didnt face any penalties nor deranking)