This is net-new between my trusty old 4.6 and 4.8.1. Prior to this version, it never did it, in about 15 years. Now, when I leave the server running and come back after some time, it throws 404. XMPP works fine. Only the admin UI is tits up.
From what I can tell from your post, it looks to me like your admin UI plugin somehow vanished from your installation Maybe it didn’t get updated or got removed during the installation.
Could you verify in your installation if you have an admin folder in your plugins?