In practice nothing should work without the source of truth being updated.
This was my main problem with NetBox as well.
You shouldn’t be able to make any changes without driving them through the source of truth.
Not to mention not every place can be assumed to declare their entire infrastructure in ansible chef or whathaveyou. If IT people everywhere got the time to redeploy their entire infrastructures only with what works for best practices to make their lives easier then IT people would probably be a lot happier :).