[rorychatt]

We use Terraform extensively at our organisation. Some examples come to mind that make this impractical: - For services that do support tags, we are already reaching limits on the number of tags that can be associated with a single resource. For example, in Azure, some resources still only support 10 unique key/values - Drift detection against write, but no read secrets mean that you cannot do drift detection over certificates, and secrets. Depending on your organisation and how they manage things like PKI, this may be impractical to track validity of the endpoint. - Many services we manage don't have tags. For example, we use Terraform to manage Github Repositories, Actions, AzDo Pipelines, and Permissions - Some object types simply don't have primary keys that are easily searchable by the provider, and requires some sort of composite key to be compiled and tracked.

State gives us a common schema and playing field to significantly simply the generation of dependency graphs and show drift. I imagine that even without a 'statefile', you would end up having to generate a similar graph in memory anyway.