“But it’s sadly often the case that a tool’s –dry-run is an unloved second-class citizen, prone to drifting out of date or failing to provide all the information you need.”
A dry run that lives in its own code path is just documentation that lies. The fix is to make the plan the input to the execution. Then the preview can’t drift from what actually happens. Most tools skip this and find out when someone trusts the preview on production.