invertigo hayfever

Except for gen 1 frozen where at best it's lose a turn and at worst lose the battle lol

There's also Instant Death which is separate from Paralyze though similar. I would also argue that stuff like Slow would fall under your definition of Paralyze and redefine the category as "negative Turn economy", which would then also include Instant Death, Frozen, Stop, and the like.

I would call Intimidate something else, perhaps Weaken, or even just Debuff, but I agree that it's a basic type.

a) buffs are status effects as 'status effect' is value-neutral; this may require expansion or redefinition of categories (ie, 'paralyze - lose a turn' could potentially be 'direct action economy manipulation' (maintaining distinction with confusion, which preserves action quantity))
b) pursuant to the discussion thread regarding instant death, this is putting the cart before the horse here; 'instant death' describes the method of inducing the status effect, not the status effect itself, because:
the actual status effect that instant death applies is 'dead', which removes all actions, making it a substatus of the defined action economy manipulation status of paralyzed, therefore:

both petrify and dead are substatuses of paralyzed, and the specific distinctions surrounding them (ff1pr petrify oddities, difficulty removing dead status) are merely what distinguish them within the group.

I would focus on a taxonomy that deals largely in fundamental resources. For example, if petrify is 'different', it's only because it interacts with another fundamental resource, the ability to control that character, or all characters, forever. If you want to separate out 'lose the game' from 'confuse' and 'paralyze' you can do so, but poison also leads to lose the game in many games, so I feel like that threads something complicated through your taxonomy.

I like having a unified system for buffs and debuffs but the main thing that does is create the concept of 'opposites' and a space for 'things which don't have opposites', as well as fully containing things that are both (eg: berserk).

Many modern games also use status effects as tags for additional abilities, so a generalized 'tag' concept would almost certainly be part of the definition of a specific game's statuses.

I think the paralyze/petrify/death discourse isn't hitting the important differentiation, which is that "If the entire party has this status, is the battle instantly lost?"

Paralyze/Stop/Freeze are non-defeat statuses, but Petrify IS. Therefore, I propose there being 5 statuses.

None of the other 4 instantly lose the game if the entire party is afflicted. It may greatly raise the chances of a loss, but it is not the same as an immediate lose condition.

Similarly, the Zombie status from Final Fantasy V is a hybrid of Confusion and Death, because it is both a loss condition and a removal of control from the player.

Ok but what about Doom/Death Sentence where it puts a timer over your head and something bad happens at the end of the timer?

Or what about an effect like Blind in FF6 SNES, where it doesn't actually do anything at all?