is there a way to make a pulumi run wait if there's an operation underway? other than some hacky bash...

There is not, but please consider filing an issue in github.com/pulumi/pulumi, it’s certainly a reasonable thing to add. Today I believe you can do it using “hacky bash” if you are blocked. But generally, waiting might cause problems depending on your situation. Most CI/CD systems have a hard time limit on how long the job/step can run. And so if wait until an update completes (or series of updates), you might run up to that limit. And having the CI/CD system kill the process halfway through an update could lead to “problems”.

yeah, i'm not so concerned with job timeouts since pulumi will bail from updates after a certain amount of "no progress" time as it is, and i can always bump up the job timeout. i'm more concerned with my devs killing running pipelines in gitlab, where stopping a job just `kill -9`s it. anyway, thanks for the suggestion, i opened https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/4052. i'd apply the enhancement label if i could 🙂