Nice golf, but your solution never returns 0, which is what the original snippet does. Furthermore, if $status is '0E0' or '0.0' it returns 1, because they both are true values, though numerically zero.
See:

for ( 0, 0.0, "0", "0.0", "0E0", 1, "1" ) {
   print $_, "\t", !!$_, "\t", ( $_==0 ? 0 : 1 ), "\n";
}
[download]

prints out

0               0
0               0
0               0
0.0     1       0
0E0     1       0
1       1       1
1       1       1

Best regards

Antonio Bellezza

Update: As pointed out in other posts, the same behaviour of "0.0" and "0E0" is true for strings not representing numbers, which have true values, but behave as 0 in numeric comparison. The difference is a warning of type

Argument "xyz" isn't numeric in numeric eq (==) at - line 3.

when -w is enabled.