The constantly moving goalposts of Azure Automation's DSC Validation

For the better part of the 2020 I've been using a defaults resource within my DSC modules as outlined in THIS post. This suddenly stopped working, failing with the error that the DSC Resource DomainControllerCommonDefaults wasn't available. Looking at the exported activities within the module listed in Azure Automation showed that the resource was not being exported.

To work around this issue, I created a dedicated WindowsDefaults module which has a dedicated DSC resource for each of the group of default settings I use. The folder structure is the same as in the previous post, but we now need to import the Defaults modules in configuration files.

Folder layout:

PRIVATE.DSC.WINDOWS.DEFAULTS
|   PRIVATE.DSC.Windows.DEFAULTS.psd1
|
\---DSCResources    |
    +---DomainControllerCommonDefaults
    |       DomainControllerCommonDefaults.psd1
    |       DomainControllerCommonDefaults.schema.psm1
    |
    +---FileServerCommonDefaults
    |       FileServerCommonDefaults.psd1
    |       FileServerCommonDefaults.schema.psm1
    |
    +---WindowsServerCommonDefaults
    |       WindowsServerCommonDefaults.psd1
    |       WindowsServerCommonDefaults.schema.psm1
    |
    +---WebServerCommonDefaults
    |       WebServerCommonDefaults.psd1
    |       WebServerCommonDefaults.schema.psm1
    |
    +---WindowsCommonDefaults
    |       WindowsCommonDefaults.psd1
    |       WindowsCommonDefaults.schema.psm1

Then in our configuration files we import the defaults composite resource with Import-DSCResource -ModuleName 'PRIVATE.DSC.WINDOWS.DEFAULTS' and then don't need to update the actual defaults settings in the configuration file.