I've had to do something like that for an awful application where the frontend did chunked downloads, but didn't check properly for the status code, embedding error pages directly in the downloaded file.
As I had no control over the frontend itself, I configured the reverse proxy so that for requests to download endpoints, all error responses would instantly close the connection to the client.
Your post makes me think that I could generalize this so that any error to an explicit download would close the connection at the network level. It would be quite tricky to be able to distinguish between implicit and explicit downloads, but I think that if the frontend, backend and reverse proxy coordinate well together, it can be done without introducing other problems.
Of course, it's a big hack that's not worth the bother.
As I had no control over the frontend itself, I configured the reverse proxy so that for requests to download endpoints, all error responses would instantly close the connection to the client.
Your post makes me think that I could generalize this so that any error to an explicit download would close the connection at the network level. It would be quite tricky to be able to distinguish between implicit and explicit downloads, but I think that if the frontend, backend and reverse proxy coordinate well together, it can be done without introducing other problems.
Of course, it's a big hack that's not worth the bother.