My teammate Michael has been working on improving the reliability and performance of controllers at scale, check out his post about staleness mitigation on the official Kubernetes blog.
> Staleness in Kubernetes controllers is a problem that affects many controllers, and is something may affect controller behavior in subtle ways. It is usually not until it is too late, when a controller in production has already taken incorrect action, that staleness is found to be an issue due to some underlying assumption made by the controller author. Some issues caused by staleness include controllers taking incorrect actions, controllers not taking action when they should, and controllers taking too long to take action. I am excited to announce that Kubernetes v1.36 includes new features that help mitigate staleness in controllers and provide better observability into controller behavior.
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More detail in the article, and also the KEP: