Join INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES with another table with more TABLE_NAMES and result would be different if table name is in the first table or not

we have a Table with a list of table names we want to be created. They don't have an ID column or anything, it's just a few rows of data with 2 columns. Thing is we want to merge that table with Information_schema.table to check which of the tables we have already created and which we have not, so we wrote the query below as a temp to achieve such:

with cte1 as (
select d.TABNAME, d.CLASS from dbo.table_list as d
left join INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES as t on t.TABLE_NAME = d.TABNAME
where d.CLASS in ('INIT','STERN') and table_schema = 'dbo'),

cte2 as (select d.TABNAME, d.CLASS
from dbo.table_list as d
where d.CLASS in ('INIT','TERN') and d.TABNAME not in (select [TABLE NAME] from cte1))


select *, 'Active' as [Status] from cte1 union all
select * , 'Inactive' from cte2 

This is what table_list looks like:

We already have TABLE1 and TABLE2 created so the result of the query looks like this:

It works well enough like this but we were wondering if we could make it shorter.

This can be way shorter, yes. You could just reference the table dbo.table_list and see if you get a valid OBJECT_ID:

SELECT tl.TABNAME,
       tl.CLASS,
       CASE WHEN OBJECT_ID(N'dbo.' + QUOTENAME(tl.TABNAME)) IS NULL THEN 'Inactive' ELSE 'Active' END AS Status
FROM dbo.table_list tl --"d" for "table_list" doesn't make a lot of sense.
WHERE tl.CLASS IN ('INIT','STERN');

If you wanted to use the catalog views, you could use CROSS APPLY to join to the table while supplying a value for both the schema and table name, or just JOIN to sys.schemas based on a literal and then LEFT JOIN to sys.tables:

SELECT tl.TABNAME,
       tl.CLASS,
       CASE WHEN st.[name] IS NULL THEN 'Inactive' ELSE 'Active' END AS Status
FROM dbo.table_list tl --"d" for "table_list" doesn't make a lot of sense.
     CROSS APPLY (SELECT t.[name]
                  FROM sys.schemas s
                       JOIN sys.tables t ON s.schema_id = t.schema_id
                  WHERE s.[name] = N'dbo'
                    AND t.[name] = tl.TABNAME) st
WHERE tl.CLASS IN ('INIT','STERN');

SELECT tl.TABNAME,
       tl.CLASS,
       CASE WHEN t.[name] IS NULL THEN 'Inactive' ELSE 'Active' END AS Status
FROM dbo.table_list tl --"d" for "table_list" doesn't make a lot of sense.
     JOIN sys.schemas s ON s.[name] = N'dbo'
     LEFT JOIN sys.tables t ON s.schema_id = t.schema_id
                           AND tl.TABNAME = t.[name]
WHERE tl.CLASS IN ('INIT','STERN');