[silverlyra]

It sounds to me more like Puppet's "ensure absent"; still declarative in the sense that you can keep it around and it will continue to clean up any zombie instances that recur.

And this is only during incremental adoption, where you'd soft-delete resources in your config by switching them to tombstones instead of removing them entirely, and adding tombstones for legacy unmanaged resources you want to remove (which builds up a nice history of those removals).

Once that's done, switch to "omnipresent" mode, delete all the tombstones, and never worry about them or state again.

[pst]

Keeping the tombstones around in the configuration I have to maintain instead of the state the tool maintains for me also increases the effort for me though. So either I have the effort of setting up the remote state and handling some edge cases. Or handling the shortcomings of stateless in my own code base.