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.

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Your guesses are correct. As of the change you listed below, projects in a self-managed backend (s3, azure blob, etc) are now the same as Pulumi Cloud.
<https://www.pulumi.com/blog/project-scoped-stacks-in-self-managed-backend/>