DO pretty much never seems to post anything on their status page unless it affects a lot of their customers -- I've had support tickets with them where they say a problem is affecting "some" customers, but they pretty much never posted it on their status page. Whereas Linode seems to post status problems far more frequently, and pretty much none of the problems listed have ever affected any of my nodes.

Of course, this is all anecdotal, but Linode really does seem to over report on their status page. And DO perhaps under reports.

This. My experience has been that Linode is very transparent about status messages, and I'd even go so far as to say the most transparent I've seen. Usually if an external service reports a timeout to me and I visit the status page there is often an investigation notice posted regarding network latency.

to be fair Linode also only posts when outages are DC-wide or otherwise affect large numbers of users.

I've saw restarts and networks issues frequently on DO months ago. They seem to have stabilized in the NYC datacenters where I host https://minimalreader.com/ but overall, the stability always seems to be on the edge of collapse. I'm not sure if that's because they are growing so quickly they cannot keep their network and hosts up with the demand, or what.

Not a useful metric unless both use absolutely identical criteria for posting.