This has consistently pissed me off. It seems like we all just accepted that whatever they define as "functioning"/"OK" is suitable. I see the status now shows, but there should be a very loud third party ruthlessly running continuous tests against all of them. Ideally it would also provide proof of the degradation we seem to all agree happens (looking at you Gemini). Like a leaderboard focused on actual live performance. Of course they'd probably quickly game that too. But something showing time to first response, "global capacity reached" etc, effective throttling metric, a intelligence metric. Maybe like crowdsourced stats so they can't focus on improving the metrics for just the IPs associated with this hypothetical third party performance watchdog.
The one that pissed me off the most was Gemini API displaying very clearly 1) user cancelled request in Gemini chat app 2) API showing "user quota reached". Both were blatant lies. In the latter case, you could find the actual global quota cause later in the error message. I don't know why there isn't more outrage. I'm guessing this sort of behavior is not new, but it's never been so visible to me.