Is there any reason why

pulumi destroy

requires pulumi project file to be present in the directory? If I run

pulumi destroy -s organization/project_name/stack_name

it doesn't feel like it still needs to read anything from the file system right? Yet it does complain about missing .yaml file and incorrect project name if there is one from a different project. Any idea why is that?

It will try to find the project file, but if you've given a full stack name it should try to run even if it can't find the yaml file.

I've tried exactly that, assuming the same logic and it wasn't the case

Feel free to raise an issue if you've got a reliable way to repro this. It should work, and we should have tests covering this so I suspect you've hit some odd corner case if it isn't working for you.