Right, this was my point. Hosting "status.domain.com" doesn't help much when it's "domain.com" that's having the problem. I think today's event will make a lot of companies consider this a bit more.
Anyway, for them to take the github.com nameservers out of the mix they would need a completely separate domain name; would you know to look there?
You can delegate subdomains to other providers, but the NS records are still present in the servers listed in the registrar. So, you'd already need multiple DNS providers.. And you wouldn't have been down. Just sayin. I'm not sure anyone rated a DNS provider of this status getting hit this hard or completely as high enough risk to go through the trouble.
It's easy enough to look at a system and point out all the things you depend on as being a risk. The harder part is deciding which risks are high enough priority to address instead of all the other work to be done.