We are running supervisor in Docker containers. In this scenario supervisor can't be run as a daemon but instead runs in foreground. So we are setting supervisord::service_manage: false.

With this param set there will be no refresh at all on changes to config or supervisord::program-resources. That's because of this condition in reload.pp:

if $::supervisord::service_manage {
 ...
}

In my opinion applying config or resources is a completely different thing than deciding how you want to run supervisor. I will submit a PR with simply removing the if. I'm also happy to hear your opinion on this.