The "identifier" is often something that's computed later or returned from the API. Think about something like an ec2 instance - the identifier is the instance

The "identifier" is often something that's computed later or returned from the API. Think about something like an ec2 instance - the identifier is the instance ID that's returned from AWS. You can have many instances that basically look identical so how do you differentiate which one this logical resource is referencing? And back to the s3 bucket use case sometimes you want uniqueness in your name so you use a prefix instead of specifying the whole name - how do you determine which bucket that resources is referencing if there are multiple buckets matching the prefix? I hear what you're saying in terms of wanting state management to be simplified, but pretty much every IaC solution uses this explicit logical resource -> physical resource mapping in state.