Hey Thomas. Firstly, let me apologise for the poor experience here. As you note, sometimes we're privy to the issues with upstream providers and this is as a result of the bridging mechanism. It's rare there a bugs purely in the Pulumi bridge, and often the issues arise in the provider as you noted.
As for your question about maintaining providers, the reason is primarily due to the engineering work it would take to manage and maintain so many provider forks. Our chosen path is to release and manage providers using API specs, as we are with the Azure, Google (beta) and AWS (in progress) providers. Obviously this doesn't help in this case
With regards to your comment about updating the provider, we obviously want to get some of the new features in the tf provider, if you're running into issues I'd really recommend pinning your language SDKs to known good versions that work for you using
package.json
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requirements.txt
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go.mod