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Is there a way I can get a more javascript-ish diff without all those extra characters so that I can simply use the diff as my starting point for the config?

There is not today - but it's something we've talked about for this use case.

I already tried

pulumi preview --diff --json

but unfortunately the detailed diff is missing when I do so

This is likely going to be the best path to exposing this - and it sounds like almost a bug that this doesn't include the diff details in the JSON output. Could you open an issue to track this?

sure will do