like, what happens if you forget to free a pointer in c? sorry for snark but there are an unbelievably numerous amount of things to complain about in tf, never heard this one.
Assuming you mean 'forget' to free malloc'd space referenced by at least one pointer, that's an easy one .. it's reclaimed by the OS when the process ends.
Whether that's a bad thing or not really depends on context - there are entire suites of interlocked processing pipelines built about the notion of allocating required resources, throughputing data, and terminating on completion - no free()'s
Of course you're going to hurt yourself. If you didn't put lifecycle blocks on your production resources, you weren't organizationally mature enough to be using Terraform in production. Take an associate Terraform course, this specific topic is covered in it.
I think the only way to avoid accidentally destroying a resource is to refer to it somewhere else, like in a depends_on array. At least that would block the plan.
Azure Locks (which you can also manage with Terraform), Open Policy Agent, Sentinel rules, etc. will prevent a destroy even if you remove the definition from your Terraform codebase. Again, if you're not operationally mature enough, the problem isn't the tool, it's you.
