so in effect, the parent changed

You can use

Alias

objects instead: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/blob/5d91f8f32220e48a6c9b1bec1a590e5bdbb086ab/sdk/nodejs/resource.ts#L459

So that's dumb and feel free to raise an issue that Alias objects ought to support parent being just name. For now I think you'd have to construct the URN manually. That shouldn't be too tricky as you can ask for the current stack name with

getStack()

and you've got what the parent URN looks like so if you've got something like: "urnpulumitest_stack:test projectsome type:parent_name" you can just lerp in the result of getStack for the stackname part of the URN and leave the rest as is.

That works. I agree if the parent could just be a name it would be a lot more straightforward.