- interprets this as me preferring German
- tries to retrieve a non-existent German version of the page
The HTTP semantics RFC[1] is quite clear that an unqualified value should be equivalent to 1.0, and I don't think content negotiation should ever prefer a non-existent resource to one that exists.[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110#field.accept-language
Related question: if there were no changes, for instance, because it is too costly to change it now, would you choose a different model for this now?