that's not 100% correct, Mem5
Exhausted could happen if only some of the handshakes are cracked and not all of them.
but if all "hashes" are cracked, the status will be "Cracked".
The problem with WPA/WPA2 is that it could in theory happen that an user connected to the router with an incorrect password and therefore (depending on which message types were captured, see
https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=hcc...pair_table) it could happen that a wrong password was used to connect to the device and this wrong password will be "cracked" by hashcat. This actually is were rarely the case, because most WLAN users store their password somehow (on smartphone or notebook/desktop kind of nobody retypes their password on every re-connection, but the correct passwords are most of the time saved somewhere encrypted), but it could happen if you are yourself trying to connect with an incorrect password etc (in a lab environment for instance).
There are of course also other reasons why the cracked password could not work: things like MAC address filtering and too low signal etc (reasons like these are more likely than incorrect passwords were send to the router, but as said that could happen too).
I would recommend analyzing your hccapx file and check which message pairs are contained within the file and how many different networks/handshakes etc