Is there a "gratuitous destroy" like, just delete everything you know about, ignore the pending actions?

There is not currently. I though I recalled having an issue tracking this - but can’t find it - please do open one. What I’ve imagined supporting is an option to “try your hardest to delete” everything. It will not stop if it encounters errors - it will just go ahead trying to delete everything else. This would allow doing “the most cleanup possible” on a stack even if something is preventing one part of the stack from being cleanly deleted.

Yeah, we had a dev who made 22 vpcs, and set them to use all the az's, and put a bean stalk per vpc, and a refresh takes like 30ish minutes, and we know we want to smoke the whole thing.