All of this may be true, but Stripe's intention with building this is obvious: It's marketing; it's an advertisement showing how much volume Stripe handles duri

All of this may be true, but Stripe's intention with building this is obvious: It's marketing; it's an advertisement showing how much volume Stripe handles during a busy shopping period. A big hint that it's an ad is that the Stripe API Uptime is not only on the first page of the stats, but is the only thing colored green. It's showing that Stripe is easily handling this crazy load, and it's only 13% (right now) of their "current capacity"! Stripe is not building this to make sure that competitors, creditors, investors, employees, academics, journalists or policy makers have access to important data, that's just not the function of this dashboard. Those unsure that Stripe will be reliably there for them might be swayed by seeing this during their holiday break. At least that's the marketing theory. Aesthetics are absolutely a factor on the efficacy of marketing activities, and making it "fun" or "pretty" or "flashy" is part of that.