hey crazy people 🙂 If I use my own state storage backend - can I still make use of StackReference to refer to something that was already deployed using my own storage backend, or is StackReference pulumi-service only? Thank you!

You can use stack references with a self-managed backend; you just need to be careful how you name things. There’s a great blog post on this here: https://martinjt.me/2021/03/04/pulumi-multiple-projects-with-custom-backends/

that was FAST... minutes...

Pulumi employees (just like Pulumi itself) are speedy

🙂