Comment 3 for bug 1931392

Yes, I see what you mean. The documentation is confusing. The concept of sensitive or redacted metadata was added to accommodate the "cloud-init query" command. On a launched instance, you can run something like:

cloud-init query merged_cfg

As root, you'll see the entire config, as non-root you'll see redacted as we don't want to expose sensitive data to non-root users. This is what your second quote refers to.

Since cloud-init is run as root, I think it was an oversight that the template rendering wasn't extended to include the sensitive data when this change was made. I'll put up a PR to allow sensitive data in a jinja templated config and hopefully clarify the documentation some.