were unnecessarily using `--node-ip` with an external cloud provider in 1.23,
  and then running into problems with 1.24, could not fix the problem by just
  removing the unnecessary `--node-ip` from the kubelet arguments, because

- Fixed the bug where images that were pinned by the container runtime could be garbage collected by `kubelet`. ([#119986](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/119986), [@ruiwen-zhao](https://github.com/ruiwen-zhao))

This was designed this way mainly to allow using the same objects "yielded" by dependencies inside of background tasks, because the exit code would be executed after the background tasks were finished.

### Other notable changes

* Fixed a regression where the kubelet would fail to update the ready status of pods. ([#86195](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/86195), [@tedyu](https://github.com/tedyu))
* Fix nil pointer dereference in azure cloud provider ([#85975](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/85975), [@ldx](https://github.com/ldx))

- Controller-manager: the following flags have no effect and would be removed in v1.24:
  - `--port`
  - `--address`
  The insecure port flags `--port` may only be set to 0 now.
- Kube-scheduler: the `--port` and `--address` flags have no effect and would be removed in v1.24.
  The insecure port flags `--port` may only be set to 0 now.

 
## Changes by Kind

### API Change

* Fixes issue where you could not mount NFS or glusterFS volumes using hostnames on GCI/GKE with COS images. ([#42376](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/42376), [@jingxu97](https://github.com/jingxu97))

* fixes a validation error that could prevent updates to StatefulSet objects containing non-normalized resource requests ([#66165](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66165), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

FeatureGate is currently in Alpha, which means is currently disabled by default. Once the FeatureGate moves to beta, in-tree cloud providers would be disabled by default, and a user won't be able to specify `--cloud-provider=<aws|openstack|azure|gcp|vsphere>` anymore to any of KCM, KAPI or kubelet. Only a '--cloud-provider=external' would be allowed. CCM would have to run out-of-tree with CSI. ([#100136](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/100136), [@Danil-Grigorev](https://github.com/Danil-Grigorev))...

* kube-apiserver would return 400 Bad Request when it couldn't decode a json patch. ([#68346](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/68346), [@CaoShuFeng](https://github.com/CaoShuFeng))
    * kube-apiserver would return 422 Unprocessable Entity when a json patch couldn't be applied to one object.