I used to be on the product team @ Terraform. The overwhelming majority of uses for state surgery are break glass hacks for other issues, the fact people had t

I used to be on the product team @ Terraform. The overwhelming majority of uses for state surgery are break glass hacks for other issues, the fact people had to resort to it so frequently was a bug and something we were working hard to fix. The one you called out was (hopefully) addressed by having a stable schema, or at least one that could be read by newer and older versions in a consistent way, since (irrc) v0.14. Config-driven moves (`moved` statements in HCL) was a big one, especially for refactoring into or between modules. The recent import functionality is another in that long line. Some of the historical version upgrade specific issues we had to retrospectively address so they were more akin to guided workflows than core changes, and so they only existed in Terraform Cloud (though not paid-for features last I knew). I'm sure we didn't get every single use case solved. But I'd recommend to everyone that if they find themselves reaching for a state command to double check there isn't now a better way. If there isn't a better way, it's worth making sure someone on the Terraform team is aware of that fact.