[NovemberWhiskey]

Congratulations; your state management is now part of your code.

[GeneralMayhem]

And that would be a huge improvement! Code has history. Code can be managed with sed and grep. Code can be generated by tools I write myself.

Adding a tombstone for deletion, or a formerly-known-as tag for renames, is only "state" in the way that reserved tag numbers in protocol buffers are "state". It is a little annoying to have to do, and it creates clutter that you eventually have to go back and clean up, but neither of those is a dealbreaker, and in the meantime it solves the second-biggest problem with Terraform, which is the inscrutability of what it actually thinks it's doing when it comes up with a plan you don't expect. (The biggest problem is how ridiculously inexpressive HCL is as a language.)

[InvertedRhodium]

The best practices for terraform is to use a versioned state store, which covers history.

Under the hood, the terraform file is just JSON, so sed, grep, jq etc can be used to manipulate it (as well as any other tools you'd care to write).