They know internally from the real status dashboards & real monitoring.
I think the issue is that this status page is maintained by hand, by humans, and updating it likely requires lots of communication and sign-off approvals, and trying to get numbers to decide whether an outage is big or only impacting a tiny fraction of users. Otherwise it'd probably always be red.
FYI - these charts are more than likely updated by hand, by a person, with a bunch of deliberation and very high level approval (your actual SLA is probably based off of this person's call). At least that's how it was at another FAANG.
That seems reasonable to me. You could argue that the posting should be quicker, but it's never going to be instantaneous. Back-timing is at least somewhat transparent.
[0] https://status.cloud.google.com/
Edit: status page not entirely green now, took them 25 minutes to acknowledge.