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Yes - there is currently no great way to do this - we still thinking about how best to support this sort of thing in a clean desired-state model. The state with two updates approach is something I’ve seen used - though it is indeed a bit “hacky”. We’ve also used effectively shelling out to

kubectl apply

as another workaround for this for example in the Pulumi-EKS package. This also is not ideal - but has worked reasonably well. But it’s not “simple”. See https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-eks/blob/master/nodejs/eks/cni.ts#L151. We have a few issues opened tracking ideas on how to support this in a more first-class way.

The shell trick is neat. But this would apply the update every time?

The ways it's used in that linked code snippet is as part of a dynamic provider - so it's done only in the Create step - this is not trivial at all - but is possible.