Interesting new feature landing in

v1.17.0

. It introduces a new plan flag:

terraform plan -minimal-refresh

. Using

-minimal-refresh

is similar in principle to #35290 (comment), per resource instance, so Terraform will first plan using the pre-refreshed state of a resource and if the change produced is a no-op, then the refresh will be skipped. If that plan does produce a change (anything but no-op), then Terraform will refresh the state for just that resource and run another plan. github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/35290

That's a welcome improvement