Would a 410 help Google stop crawling old tag pages on a small blog

[Alessia Wilkins]

I have a small blog with just under a thousand pages in total, and a lot of the old tag pages on it get almost no traffic now. Most of them were made years ago when I added a tag for almost every topic, and now many of them only show one or two posts. Google still crawls a lot of these tag pages, and I keep wondering if that is taking crawl away from the newer posts that actually matter. I have been thinking about returning a 410 status on the old tag pages that have no traffic and no links pointing to them, so Google knows they are gone for good. My worry is that Google might treat a 410 in much the same way as a 404 here, and it might not change anything at all for a site this small. I am trying to work out if a 410 is worth doing in this case, or if it would be better to just leave the tag pages alone, noindex them, or remove the links to them and let them fade away on their own. I would like to hear from anyone who has tried a 410 on old tag pages on a small site, and what happened to crawl and traffic after they did it.