This is a clone of issue OCPBUGS-26014. The following is the description of the original issue:
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Description of problem:

While testing oc adm upgrade status against b02, I noticed some COs do not have any annotations, while I expected them to have the include/exclude.release.openshift.io/* ones (to recognize COs that come from the payload).

$ b02 get clusteroperator etcd -o jsonpath={.metadata.annotations}
$ ota-stage get clusteroperator etcd -o jsonpath={.metadata.annotations}
{"exclude.release.openshift.io/internal-openshift-hosted":"true","include.release.openshift.io/self-managed-high-availability":"true","include.release.openshift.io/single-node-developer":"true"}

CVO does not reconcile CO resources once they exist, only precreates them but does not touch them once they exist. Build02 does not have CO with reconciled metadata because it was born as 4.2 which (AFAIK) is before OCP started to use the exclude/include annotations.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

4.16 (development branch)

How reproducible:

deterministic

Steps to Reproduce:

1. delete an annotation on a ClusterOperator resource

Actual results:

The annotation wont be recreated

Expected results:

The annotation should be recreated