I noticed that after I posted and had read a bit more; but you're also using F# which has proper ADTs. I'm typically writing support scripts in Python or the like, and even very good libraries like click[1] nevertheless reflect the idioms popular in the language.

I really came back to this post because I was struggling with Gradle and if there is a more perfect illustration of how a dry run mode could help than that, I don't know what it could be. Gradle builds are a fucking mystery, every time, and there's no excuse for it.

[1]: https://palletsprojects.com/p/click/