When the choice is between temporarily "looking dumb" and permanently loosing a bunch of money because of SLAs, companies like Salesforce usually make the latter choice.
Usually this is less being outright deceptive (saying you're up when you know you're down), and more wrapping the definition of "down" in legalese so that nothing short of a complete system outage of every aspect of your service for 100% of users counts as "down".
In those cases status pages are more likely to have a lovely spectrum of yellows and oranges to choose from, but a distinct absence of red, but very few companies will say that they're fully green when they know there's issues. Green when you're down is usually more of a symptom of process problems in how outages get reported or resolved (no documentation, manual processes for updating, long communication chains from support teams to engineers).
Nah the issue isn't looking dumb, the issue is looking like a liar. What good is an SLA if your reputation is that you're going to lie to avoid paying out?
This is Salesforce we are talking about. They topped Stack Overflow as the most dreaded technology so they bribed SO not to include them anymore. They don't care if they look like liars to technical people. Technical people are not the decisions makers in their target customer base.
I feel like customers treating you like a bunch of fucking idiots is not gonna be a great boost to your bottom line either. Maybe if you're in a market sector where reputation doesn't matter and you don't have any competition swooping in.
