What about HELP menus for IF newbies? I suppose some people don’t need them, anyone who does need them presumably also needs the status bar so they can figure out how to operate the menus.
I skimmed the IFDB Top 20 and thought about it; I can only think of two games in the top 20 that don’t use HELP menus and don’t convey essential information in the status bar: Spider and Web, and Eat Me.
I think it’s “wishful thinking” to say that the status bar is unnecessary. It wasn’t necessary for authors to rely on the status bar—we could have all designed games without using the status bar for the last 25 years—but given that the top-rated games usually do rely on the status bar, it seems odd to say that your IF Player doesn’t need to support it.
Similarly, we can say “oh, I wish IF games didn’t rely on combining input and output in a single rectangle,” but the fact is, they do.