[GeneralMayhem]

It's not that bad as long as you have a reasonable deployment process. If you can't rely on your production state being fairly up to date relative to the Terraform definition, then you've got bigger problems than dealing with TF statefulness.

If you know that TF changes are guaranteed to be deployed within X days of writing them (e.g., with something like Atlantis, or even a weekly deployment schedule), then you can put a date in the comment of when the tombstone was added, and clean it up either automatically after X days or occasionally in a semi-automated sweep.

[aayjaychan]

I agree having production updated frequently is ideal, but sometimes we don't get to choose when things are deployed when working with external clients. I'm glad Terraform doesn't dictate the workflow, so that we can fix one thing at a time.