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i wonder how they even work? Like, do they just display a green css button instead of _actually_ doing a healthcheck?
Yes they do, because very rarely would such a healthcheck kind of setup actually work in practice, at a large enough size, for a user-facing dashboard. If you want a healthcheck, look at a Grafana dashboard, not a status page. By the way, I don't know of a single place where this isn't the case, where a human signs off on and updates the status page during large events (at least at the final decision.) Some of it wil…
We actually stopped doing this a year or two later because reporters were setting up monitoring on that page showing up and were reporting on outage statistics based on it. So we just left the site up in whatever degraded state it was in and that made the problem of measuring www.amazon.com uptime externally that little bit more difficult.