This is a clone of issue OCPBUGS-18103. The following is the description of the original issue:
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Description:

Now that the huge e2e test case failures in CI jobs is resolved in the recent jobs observed a Undiagnosed panic detected in pod issue.

JobLink

Error:

{ pods/openshift-image-registry_cluster-image-registry-operator-7f7bd7c9b4-k8fmh_cluster-image-registry-operator_previous.log.gz:E0825 02:44:06.686400 1 runtime.go:79] Observed a panic: "invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference" (runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference) pods/openshift-image-registry_cluster-image-registry-operator-7f7bd7c9b4-k8fmh_cluster-image-registry-operator_previous.log.gz:E0825 02:44:06.686630 1 runtime.go:79] Observed a panic: "invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference" (runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference)}

Some Observations:
1)While starting ImageConfigController it Failed to watch *v1.Route: as the server could not find the requested resource",

2)which eventually lead sync problem "E0825 01:26:52.428694       1 clusteroperator.go:104] unable to sync ClusterOperatorStatusController: config.imageregistry.operator.openshift.io "cluster" not found, requeuing" 

3)and then while creating deployment resource for "cluster-image-registry-operator" it caused a panic error: "invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference" (runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference):"