- https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/pull/4911: Drop support for a very old, legacy style of patches. patches used to be allowed to be used as an alias for patchesStrategicMerge in kustomize v3. You now have to use patchesStrategicMerge explicitly, or update to the new syntax supported by patches. See examples in the PR description of https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/pull/4911.

* Added a feature gate for the plugin watcher. ([#64605](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/64605), [@vikaschoudhary16](https://github.com/vikaschoudhary16))

### Bug or Regression

- EndpointSlice IP validation now matches Endpoints IP validation. ([#101084](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/101084), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott)) [SIG Apps and Network]

#### Auth

- The Rancher credential provider has now been removed. This only affects you if you are using the downstream Rancher distro. ([#77099](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/77099), [@dims](https://github.com/dims))


#### AWS

- kube-apiserver: fixed a bug that could cause a goroutine leak if the apiserver encountered an encoding error serving a watch to a websocket watcher ([#84693](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/84693), [@tedyu](https://github.com/tedyu))

### Feature

- 'kubeadm: enhanced the "patches" functionality to be able to patch coredns
  deployment. The new patch target is called "corednsdeployment" (e.g. patch file
  "corednsdeployment+json.json"). This makes it possible to apply custom patches

- Ensure Job status updates are batched by 1s. This fixes an unlikely scenario when a sequence of immediately 
  completing pods could trigger a sequence of non-batched Job status updates. ([#118470](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118470), [@mimowo](https://github.com/mimowo)) [SIG Apps]

- Implement a new feature that allows applying kustomize patches to static pod manifests generated by kubeadm. ([#80905](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/80905), [@fabriziopandini](https://gi...

* kube-apiserver: fixed a bug that could cause a goroutine leak if the apiserver encountered an encoding error serving a watch to a websocket watcher ([#84693](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/84693), [@tedyu](https://github.com/tedyu))

### Network