I agree with you. If the exact page was deleted, it may not be the best experience for the user to just redirect them to the closest match. However, you could solve this in the UI by telling them that they were redirected because the original page was not found. Showing just 404 page is not a great experience either. You could also adjust this behavior based on the score of the match – anything that's 90% match should be good enough.

For what it is worth, I opted to showing 404 page and suggest the URL they were most likely looking for, e.g. https://aimd.app/blog/2023-12-27-programmatic-seo-what-is-it...