As far as I can tell, the only thing this card lets you do is resolve a "+X" resource die without having another die to trigger it. It costs 1 resource and gives you +1 resource, so there's no materiel benefit to playing it otherwise, right? Seems super weak for having the spot drawback.

It costs 0, not 1. If you're using the card database "swdestinydb.com", which is where I read it as 1 the other day, they've been wrong on the cost of a lot of cards.