What are the 2x status menu items that only have '.' in their titles?

You are describing a feature you don’t like as a bug. When that code was written people would frequently switch their status message and that list kept track of them. There probably should have been a way to delete them, but as far as I’m aware, it has never come up until now.

That said, as I’ve been telling you repeatedly, Pidgin 2.x has been in hard maintenance mode for over a year and a half. And was basically in a hard maintenance mode for years before the official announcement. I will quote the import part of the post here for clarity:

As implied earlier, maintenance mode isn’t the focus of the team. The team will work on it if a security issue or a pretty bad bug is identified, but otherwise we just kind of let it sit since it is in a working state. However, the majority of the work when something is in maintenance mode actually comes from outside of the core development team.

The Pidgin developers are a small team of volunteers and have been focusing our time on the next major release. See Pidgin 3.0.0 Experimental 1 Announcement.

This is the point of what we are developing.