Effectively all of the “get_*” calls are useless outside passing them into another Pulumi resource as an argument

It’s a future, you can use it like you would any other future, i.e. you can await it in

async

functions and then use them for control flow. Python does force you to acknowledge that you’ve now built an asynchronous graph and you’ll have to pass something into a Pulumi resource, but you can do whatever you want in an async function.