This is slightly unclean. Even tho it would otherwise be syntactically
valid, using $status as a command is very very very likely to be an
error, like
if not $status
We have reports of this surprisingly regularly, including #2773.
Because $status can only ever be a value from 0 to 255, it is also
very unlikely to be an actual command, and that command is very
unlikely to do what you want.
So we simply point the user towards the "conditions" help section,
that should explain things.