As a non-native English speaker, I had the same impression. Status is stuff like “order has been paid”, or “message delivery failed”, or “rent is past due” etc. It’s often just one small piece of data, bound to one object.
State on the other hand feels much more like a bigger thing that’s being kept somewhere persistently. You can say that your building’s utility payments is state (usually kept on paper by one person). Also your taxes are state. An Ecto.Changeset is a state that you pass around and maybe modify and pass the new version to another function. A database is state. :ets cache is a state. Redis / Kafka queues are state.
