[pojzon]

Im gonna ignore the fact that moving state to other place completwly misses article point, but:

Two Users create exactly the same resource with the same tags.

Which one should be removed by Terraform?

Now either way lets ignore that.

You want to refresh infrastructure to know what to do. Without the state you have to go through EVERY API CALL on every service even those you did not create to be able to determine the whole state of the infrastructure which would be super super long action.

Without dependencies you would also have to maintain and build dependency tree EVERY TIME you would try to apply infra.

[cheradenine_uk]

I don't believe it misses the article's point - I think he's asking the valid question "if the target system has the ability to to store all the required state in order to understand mappings between what I want and what I have, why do we need additional state files which always seem to be wrong"

And a good answer might be "all providers don't have that capability" and/or "providers can't efficiently answer questions about that, such as 'find me all things with this configuration tag'.

In your example, those two users wouldn't have the same tags, because you'd arrange it so that they didn't - either by user or a resource grouping based on the configuration itself. This is the choice made by some other tooling, for better or worse.