if you say it can go into main and I treat main as the next major release, it means this one should still wait for when that major is coming. We can not merge it now. This is regarding your comment:

I am a bit confused by the PR title. If this is disabled by default I think it can go in main and then make the old implementation as deprecated. Then we enable it by default in the major then remove the old implementation.

I thought everything was wrapped in a feature flag and it wasn't introducing any breaking changes. If that is not the case then it will need to wait and cannot go into main right now.

it is protected by a feature flag, I got your point now.

Would there need to be specific RBAC configuration to allow the app to make this API request?

good point! Added it in the documentation

Also, even if it is supported would it make sense to have a configuration property to force using config maps?

good point again, added such an option

This seems like a useful feature. I wonder if it makes sense for it to live in the commons package?

I can't really do that because of the very specific fabric8 APIs... but may be I will revisit this idea once I get a better understanding of the native client implementation.

I've addressed all of the comments here I think, you can take another look now.

Users have the option to switch back to the old implementation at any point in time, so the more the new one is used, the more we will polish it. As usual, I'll be there for that work...

LGTM once you are satisfied with it we can merge it into main.

I'm not there yet, I want to work on something else related indirectly with this PR for some time, and then get back to it. I would like to try and refactor some integration tests. The idea is that some integration tests do make sense, but some really need to be moved to plain tests. For example, here in this leader implementation some ITs are really needed, but because we already consume so much time with them, we can't add more. So I want to reduce their number and then add one more here. I'm not sure where that will take me, but I have to try this path first