Reusing a Domain

We picked a domain for a new service some months ago, after some simple sanity checks. It was used earlier but had been inactive for some months and did not appear in any blacklists. We built the service, took the domain live and now we find that this domain gets 25K-50K requests per day for links which (presumably) once existed on this domain. A very large majority of those come from Googlebot. I presume Google thinks that too many pages fail on this domain with a 404 and hence lowers it in the search rankings (lots of red flags in the search console). We are contemplating handling some of those with a 301 redirect to a valid (but unrelated) page, return a 410 to hopefully tell Google that the page is no longer there or serve a dummy page to avoid the 404s. Clearly all of these will not help a human user who found one of these links via search and who is best served with a 404 page having an explanation. Has anyone else had a similar situation and/or have suggestions to handle this? Also, is there a way to check such things in advance before a domain is bought (for future reference)? Thanks!