The problem

I was managing infrastructure across multiple regions a handful of virtual machines, one per region, each running the same service. The Terraform setup had grown the way these things usually do: when I needed a VM in a new region, I copied the folder for an existing region, renamed a few things, and adjusted the values that were different (location, network ranges, naming).

It worked. Until it didn't.

Every region had its own full copy of:

The provider block