See hg help pager :
pager extension - browse command output with an external pager
[...]
Below is the default list of commands to be paged:
[pager]
attend = annotate, cat, diff, export, glog, log, qdiff
Setting pager.attend to an empty value will cause all commands to be paged.
[...]
So this is a documented behavior: the status command is not unloaded by default.
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