No matter how you like to participate in developer communities, Pulumi wants to meet you there. If you want to meet other Pulumi users to share use-cases and best practices, contribute code or documentation, see us at an event, or just tell a story about something cool you did with Pulumi, you are part of our community.

Pulumi Community

These are different files, Pulumi doesn't choose between them, it checks them both for different things.
The most likely explanation for this is that you initially used this backend as one user (maybe root?), and now you're using Pulumi as a different user. Check the owner and permissions on meta.yaml. You either want to switch back to that user, or fix the permissions / ownership to allow access.

I’ve been encountering this error in recent versions. For me it’s usually aws access broken for my s3 state bucket

Ah yes. Does S3 backend still use only the SDK/default creds? If you're using a different AWS_PROFILE, you might see this error.

I think this is a aws permission issue for me. thanks