It comes in very handy when you have to deal with regional outage in a multi-region setup. Some clients I see them using atlantis with refresh being disabled by default for example.

Where a large part of the resources can't be checked (as -refresh=true by default in Terraform), you then have to run atlantis with refresh disabled

and in a custom workflow you can already do this

It seems that they've moved this logic over to the

-refresh-only

flag on

plan

and

apply