From my prelimary search, Bicep does utilize a state file, but it is completely hidden from the end users. Seems to be managed in Azure directly and automagically.
I think you might be misunderstanding this page. Bicep's "state file" is actual Azure state. Bicep is a nicer way to write ARM (Azure Resource Manager), which is pretty much an Azure API. if you are familiar with Kubernetes, ARM represents Azure internal state in the same way kubernetes YAML represents actual kubernetes objects stored in the cluster.
> No state or state files to manage: All state is stored in Azure. Users can collaborate and have confidence their updates are handled as expected.
Not sure how I could "misunderstand" this quote to mean anything else.
By that logic, CloudFormation is also the same; end users don't have access to the state so therefore the state file is the state of the environment itself? We, as users, have no idea what intermediate step exists between the configuration yaml and actual representation of an account's resources.
