The StorageProtection feature, which prevents deletion of PVCs while Pods are still using them and of PVs while still bound to a PVC, is now generally available, and volume resizing, which lets you increase size of a volume after a Pod restarts is now beta, which means it is on by default.

New alpha features include:

### API Machinery

- kube-apiserver: the `--runtime-config` flag now supports an `api/beta=false` value which disables all built-in REST API versions matching `v[0-9]+beta[0-9]+`. ([#84304](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/84304), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

If the type is a type parameter, the constant is converted into a non-constant
value of the type parameter.
</p>

<p>
An untyped constant has a <i>default type</i> which is the type to which the
constant is implicitly converted in contexts where a typed value is required,
for instance, in a <a href="#Short_variable_declarations">short variable declaration</a>

* Add a label which prevents a node from being added to a cloud load balancer ([#53146](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53146), [@brendandburns](https://github.com/brendandburns))

- The DRA device taints and toleration feature now has a separate feature gate, DRADeviceTaintRules, which controls whether support for DeviceTaintRules is enabled. It is possible to disable that and keep DRADeviceTaints enabled, in which case tainting by DRA drivers through ResourceSlices continues to work. ([#135068](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/135068), [@pohly](https://github.com/pohly)) [SIG API...

- kube-apiserver: Promoted `AuthorizeWithSelectors` feature to beta, which includes field and label selector information from requests in webhook authorization calls. Promoted `AuthorizeNodeWithSelectors` feature to beta, which changes node authorizer behavior to limit requests from node API clients, so that each Node can only get / list / watch its own Node API object, and can also only get / list...

  - The label reconciliation happens as part of periodic status update which can be configured via flag `--node-status-update-frequency` ([#104613](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/104613), [@ravisantos...

### API Change

- Implemented `event_handling_duration_seconds` metric, which is the time the scheduler takes to handle each kind of events. ([#125929](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/125929), [@sanposhiho](https://github.com/sanposhiho))

### API Machinery

Extensibility. SIG API Machinery added a new class of admission control webhooks (mutating), and brought the admission control webhooks to beta.

### Apps