A Masterpoint newsletter post argues that destroying infrastructure with Terraform is often more problematic than creating it. Matt Gowie cites cloud provider gotchas like deletion protection, resource attachments, and active processing tasks. He notes these issues make resource deletion a common source of frustration for DevOps teams.

The core challenge lies in the cloud's safeguards. AWS S3 buckets, databases, and EC2 instances can block deletion. This forces engineers into manual ClickOps fixes in the console, which is error-prone and breaks Infrastructure as Code (IaC) workflows. It's a classic Day 2 operation headache.

Gowie's advice is pragmatic: treat destructive operations as one-offs unless they become a recurring bottleneck. For frequent issues, automate fixes like emptying buckets or disabling protection in dev environments. The goal is to avoid FRD (Fear of Resource Deletion) while keeping production safeguards intact.