As you point out, there are good reasons to take other approaches.
One advantage of pulp's restrictive approach is that it forces the
migration writer to know with certainty which migrations will have already
run. You can imagine the trouble that might ensue if two developers created
migrations
We're working on some custom Pulp migrations to fix up some data issues
in our Pulp installation.
https://docs.pulpproject.org/dev-guide/newtypesupport/plugin/migrations.html
The migration mechanism has an annoying restriction: there aren't
allowed to be any gaps in the migration sequence. For
