There's no sweet spot I've found. I don't work for Cloudflare but when I did have a status indicator to maintain, you could never please everyone. Users would complain when our system was up but a dependent system was down, saying that our status indicator was a lie. "Fixing" that by marking our system as down or degraded whenever a dependent system was down led to the status indicator being not green regularly, causing us to unfairly develop a reputation as unreliable (most broken dependencies had limited blast radius). The juice no longer seemed worth the squeeze and we gave up on automated status indicators.
> whenever a dependent system was down led to the status indicator being not green regularly, causing us to unfairly develop a reputation as unreliable (most broken dependencies had limited blast radius)
You are responsible of your dependencies, unless they are specific integrations. Either switch to more reliable dependencies or add redundancy so that you can switch between providers when any is down.
> "Fixing" that by marking our system as down or degraded whenever a dependent system was down led to the status indicator being not green regularly, causing us to unfairly develop a reputation as unreliable (most broken dependencies had limited blast radius).
This seems like an issue with the design of your status page. If the broken dependencies truly had a limited blast radius, that should've been able to be communicated in your indicators and statistics. If not, then the unreliable reputation was deserved, and all you did by removing the status page was hide it.
The headline status doesn't have to be "worst of all systems". Pick a key indicator, and as long as it doesn't look like it's all green regardless of whether you're up or down, users will imagine that "green headline, red subsystems" means whatever they're observing, even if that makes the status display utterly uninterpretable from an outside perspective.
