There's lies, damn lies, and status pages.
First, deciding what to put on them is PM hell. Is it customer-facing? Developer-facing? Both?
Then, for each item, how do you test so you can be really sure? Half the time tests will produce either false negatives or false positives. If your test writes data (like, say, posting a comment), is it a meaningful test of it's to a test or demo topic? But if it's to real topics, the test itself becomes user impacting.
Or you can use traffic stats to estimate whether things are going well, but then your traffic stats are question. Something may report zero traffic when things are great, or normal traffic when things are broken.
Then you have the classic "the tests are failing because the testing infra is broken, but production users are fine."
There just isn't a good answer to most of the problems status pages face. So, yeah, they suck, but I think there may be a Godel argument here that it is not possible for them to be timely, meaningful, and accurate.
They have a pretty good idea if something internal is broken, but it's very hard to know that everything is fixed.
That said, I agree that manually updated pages are generally more useful and accurate than automated ones. It's just an extra tax on the incident team.
When I say "stopped showing up", I mean I could see my comments on my user page but they wouldn't show up on the thread (even for me), and I would get replies to older comments I made in my inbox but they wouldn't show up in the thread either. (Yes, only an hour or so before this happened I made a post that got a bunch of engagement, and I was actively responding to people who replied to me.)
I knew the mods weren't removing my comments because your removed comments still show up in the thread for you while you're logged in, and the mods weren't removing the comments of the people replying to me either because they would've disappeared from my inbox if that was the case. Ergo, outage.
And then it happened again like two weeks later.