If your statement is true, then why is the AWS status page widely considered useless, and everyone congregates on HN and/or Twitter to actually know what's broken on AWS during an outage?
My experience generally aligns with amzn-throw, but this right here is why. There's a manual step here and there's always drama surrounding it. The process to update the status page is fully automated on both sides of this step, if you removed VP approval, the page would update immediately. So if the page doesn't update, it is always a VP dragging their feet. Even worse is that lags in this step were never discussed in the postmortem reviews that I was a part of.
Let's not pretend businesses haven't been intentionally advertising in deceitful ways for decades if not hundreds of years. This just happens to be current strategy in tech of lying and deceiving customers to limit liability, responsibility, and recourse actions.
To be fair, it's not it's not just Amazon, they just happen to be the largest and targeted whipping boys on the block. Few businesses under any circumstances will admit to liability under any circumstances. Liability has to always be assessed externally.