Status pages are updated by humans and the humans need to (1) realize there's a problem and (2) understand the magnitude of the problem and (3) put that on the status page.
It's not fake, it's just a human process. And automating this would be error prone just the same.
Very good points. Meanwhile I have clients asking me why they can't have a status page to which I reply: you can, but ultimately to be completely fail proof it will be a human updating it slowly. To which they reply: but GitHub or X does it...
And Jeli.io for this! With the Statuspage integration, you can set the status, impact, write a message for customers, and select impacted components all without leaving Slack. Statuspage gets updated with a click of a button.
I wouldn't necessarily call them fake, but the issue often has to be big enough for most companies to admit to it. AWS often has smaller outages that they will never acknowledge.
It's not fake, it's just a human process. And automating this would be error prone just the same.