For the shortcoming of conveying errors strictly through HTTP status codes, consider:
RFC-7807, Problem Details for HTTP APIs[0]
From the introduction:
HTTP [RFC7230] status codes are sometimes not sufficient to convey
enough information about an error to be helpful. While humans behind
Web browsers can be informed about the nature of the problem with an
HTML [W3C.REC-html5-20141028] response body, non-human consumers of
so-called "HTTP APIs" are usually not.
This specification defines simple JSON [RFC7159] and XML
[W3C.REC-xml-20081126] document formats to suit this purpose. They
are designed to be reused by HTTP APIs, which can identify distinct
"problem types" specific to their needs.