[jo909]

Well I've seen many environments, and some only ran puppet manually whenever they would before had used ssh and made a change directly. Another allowed one group of admins to just continue to log in and make small config changes, then got alerts and diffs of those changes from running puppet in noop and incorporated those changes into their git after the fact.

It's a tool to be used however you see fit and what you describe sounds reasonable, but the most common (because default) setup I've seen is the 30 minute interval.

Which is why I would argue "time of last puppet run" is mostly fairly recent and consistent for all machines, but terraform apply is most often not run automatically, not even at daily intervals.