You are right that the simplicity of the state file is a strength and we do not want to lose that. One of our goals with Stategraph is to make state just as easy to inspect through both the command line and the UI.

Not every Terraform setup runs into scaling pain. The trouble tends to show up in larger repos with thousands of resources where teams share big chunks of infra. That is where global locks and full refreshes become a bottleneck and where we think graph semantics help.