[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.