Initially I wrote a long reply, but there is:
Also, there’s a schema
From that documentation, I wonder why we don’t use the status field at the top level. That’s an enum failed, changed, unchanged. These are the 3 states I would expect to see in the UI.
The fact we do that today in our report processor is probably a historical reason to be compatible with ancient Puppet versions that didn’t have this. The schema was “only” added in 2013 and already includes it (Puppet report format 4). Our report processor is still compatible with report format 0, simply because nobody looked at it for ages. There’s no reason to copy our sins.