The worst part is that the Terraform team at Hashicorp often excuse not fixing these design issues as “safety measures” which isn’t entirely untrue but when over half of your users want something, sometimes you should get over yourself.
For what it’s worth, OpenTofu is fixing many of these sorts of things that cause people pain.
But my advice is to learn to use the tool. Terraform has such great benefits (in the right use cases). If you’re struggling, either you are missing something or you chose the wrong tool for your particular job. Either way, don’t gripe that this specialized tool for infra management doesn’t work exactly like every other general purpose programming language.
Data resources are you requesting a dynamic value of your environment.
Variables are dynamic values that a user can change.
Especially if the locals vary between prod and pre-prod, and worse if dev sandboxes end up with per-user instances, which for us was mercifully only needed for people working on the TF scripts, so we could run our tests locally.
