jvitor03

> Once you've fully adopted, then you can flip a flag to "I own the whole world" mode, where the default is to delete anything not found in the canonical configuration.

That may work for a database, but for a cloud provider for example(which i dare to say, its the main usage), it's unlikely to work, because of the amount of requests needed to check all possible resources and ids or tags. Also those applies usually happens multiple times in a day issued by different users/ci automations, so there's not enough api quota to cover them all and each plan would take forever to finish depending on your organization size.

Looks like you are creating based on puppet or ansible, not Terraform :)

The whole idea of TF is to not have to declare an absent resource for it to be destroyed, because the declarative approach already have the desired state.

"Stateless is better", until you remove a tf file or resource from your code and Terraform have no way to tell if that resource ever existed in the provider during the apply to delete it, because there's nowhere to compare and it is impractical to query all existent resources and all tags/ids from those resources in the cloud provider on every infrastructure change (imagine multiple CIs doing that all day long, there's not enough api quota and your pipeline will take forever just for terraform know what to change in a medium/large organization).

That deletion and modification problems happens in Ansible and other provisioning tools that relies in idempotency, and that is one of the things that makes Terraform different from them. A stateless Terraform is useless, it's better use other provisioning tools.