While working on the Red Hat Summit demo, I have a script which deploy an Apache Kafka cluster applying the Kafka resource file and then deploy a KafkaTopic resource for creating a couple of topics.

Before applying the KafkaTopic YAML file, the bash script waits that the EO is rolled out using this "blocking" command:

echo "Waiting for entity operator to be ready..."
oc rollout status deployment/$CLUSTER-entity-operator -w -n $NAMESPACE
echo "...entity operator ready"

after that it runs

oc apply -f $DIR/cluster/$CLUSTER-kafka-topics.yaml -n $NAMESPACE

If these operations are executed in a so short time, the TO enters in a loop receiving the MODIFIED event continuously and creating znodes in a loop.

Delaying the KafkaTopic(s) creation at the end of the script so after more time the EO is started (I deploy other monitoring stuff like Grafana and Prometheus), the problem doesn't happen.