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Am curious if `pulumi refresh` turns out to be helpful here for reconciling against reality.

it’s not clear to me when to use that or what it does…

Here’s what the docs say - definitely interested in whether those answer the what/when question for you - if not, opportunity to improve!  

&gt; This command compares the current stack’s resource state with the state known to exist in the actual cloud provider. Any such changes are adopted into the current stack. Note that if the program text isn’t updated accordingly, subsequent updates may still appear to be out of synch with respect to the cloud provider’s source of truth.

<https://pulumi.io/reference/cli/pulumi_refresh.html>

It would be interesting to just run it and look at the preview. It _should_ just synchronize anything that doesn't match reality (giving you a preview of those diffs first).