The sh.status() and db.printShardingStatus() are mongo Shell helpers that both call the internal getPrintableShardingStatus() mongo Shell function to retrieve information about the overview and configuration of the sharded cluster.

With the introduction of new aggregation stages ($clusterTopology, $listZones, $listDatabases, etc.) in the context of SPM-3796, there's an opportunity to remove the dependency of those helpers that relies on internal knowledge of the metadata format and location. However, we still need to maintain the legacy implementation for previous versions of MongoDB that do not support the new API.