It should be possible to pause reconciliation of a specific custom resource. The idea is following:

• Uses uses annotation (e.g. something like strimzi.io/pause-reconciliation: true)
• The operator sees it in the next reconciliation loop and instead of reconciling it just sets some paused status to acknowledge it and does not take any other actions
• Once the annotation is removed, the reconciliations will proceed as usually

Upstream issue: Strimzi#4367