> This makes Terraform significantly worse for the majority of its users (users of public cloud providers with APIs whose resources all have such attributes) so the remaining 1% (or less) can use it.
I think the author misunderstood the problem (maybe because it's not crystal clear on Hashicorp's website): it's not that not all cloud providers provide tags, the problem is that only certain percentage of resources are taggable.
So imagine you are using your stateless TF code based on tags only: you could only deal with those resources that support tags. Whereas now, after configuring the backend on S3 with DynamoDB, it's basically "fire and forget" - you can use practically any resource. Paradoxically, TF supports even more actions on resources on AWS than CloudFormation.
So maybe for some simple setups like EC2 with S3 this could work somehow, but for anything more complex the current implementation is far superior.
I think the author misunderstood the problem (maybe because it's not crystal clear on Hashicorp's website): it's not that not all cloud providers provide tags, the problem is that only certain percentage of resources are taggable.
So imagine you are using your stateless TF code based on tags only: you could only deal with those resources that support tags. Whereas now, after configuring the backend on S3 with DynamoDB, it's basically "fire and forget" - you can use practically any resource. Paradoxically, TF supports even more actions on resources on AWS than CloudFormation.
So maybe for some simple setups like EC2 with S3 this could work somehow, but for anything more complex the current implementation is far superior.