We should support single-step downgrades of Strimzi (e.g. from Strimzi 0.45 / Kafka 3.9.0 to Strimzi 0.40.0 / Kafka 3.7.0) as described in the proposal https://github.com/strimzi/proposals/blob/main/093-single-step-multi-version-downgrade.md Downstream, this is useful for example for LTS to LTS downgrades that we currently don't support. However, this has its risks and should be properly documented and tested. It should be also supported for KRaft only.