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That's an AWS question, rather than a Pulumi-specific question. The snapshot identifier corresponds to the same field in the RDS console or the APIs. It is used when creating or restoring a snapshot, as opposed to when deploying via Pulumi. Any time you trigger either of those actions, that field is used by RDS, not Pulumi.

If you update that field via Pulumi, nothing special will happen in RDS, other than the field will be blanked. However, you won't be able to create or restore a snapshot until you put a value in there.

Generally, you should not change the value of that field once an instance is created. RDS looks after versioning; if you create 10 snapshots, they don't overwrite each other: the identifier is used as a prefix.

If you do change the value of the field, then existing snapshots (with the old identifier) can't be restored into the instance (until you change it back).