At work we try to manage as much as we can with terraform. This also includes Route53 for zones and records. In a certain situation we had about 14 zones and 1476 records managed in a single state file.

As it happened I needed a zone recreated (but not erased) and this affected about 409 records. Well deleting them with terraform apply took ages. To the point that the temporary STS token expired and botched the process.  So after a little facepalming, I decided to cleanup the zone from the AWS console and then issue a batch of terraform state rm to reconcile the state. Happily, after that, apply took its time (but reasonably) and all was well.

I am thinking that next time I am faced with such a situation, to lock the state file in Dynamo, copy it over from S3, manipulate it locally, unlock and run a plan to see how it all plays out. Or, wherever I can, use a state per zone instead of a state file encompassing a set of zones.