The istio-operator Pod keeps waiting for the leader lease for over 30 minutes without timeout.

The issue can be reproduced with the following procedure:

1. Stop the node where the istio-operator pod is running.
2. Wait for about 6 minutes.
3. The node will become NotReady, the old istio-operator pod will become Terminating, and a new istio-operator pod will get created but in 0/1 status.

Actual Result:
The new istio-operator pod will keep in 0/1(NotReady) status for over 30 minutes, perhaps forever.

Expected Result:
The new istio-operator pod should be able to get the leader lease within a timeout, say 5 minutes after getting created.

Additional Information:
~~~
$ oc get pods -o wide
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE IP NODE NOMINATED NODE READINESS GATES
istio-operator-5446f67ff6-rdvn4 0/1 Running 0 37m 10.131.0.11 ip-10-0-146-212.ap-northeast-1.compute.internal <none> <none>
istio-operator-5446f67ff6-trq75 1/1 Terminating 0 97m 10.129.2.11 ip-10-0-178-52.ap-northeast-1.compute.internal <none> <none>
kiali-operator-7874d8d6cf-n7zrr 1/1 Running 0 37m 10.131.0.10 ip-10-0-146-212.ap-northeast-1.compute.internal <none> <none>
kiali-operator-7874d8d6cf-qp7qz 1/1 Terminating 0 97m 10.129.2.10 ip-10-0-178-52.ap-northeast-1.compute.internal <none> <none>

$ oc logs istio-operator-5446f67ff6-rdvn4
......

{"level":"info","ts":1701768009.1261392,"logger":"leader","msg":"Not the leader. Waiting."} {"level":"info","ts":1701768027.0609295,"logger":"leader","msg":"Not the leader. Waiting."} {"level":"info","ts":1701768045.693518,"logger":"leader","msg":"Not the leader. Waiting."}

~~~

Feasible workaround:
A feasible workaround is to manually delete the istio-operator-lock configmap. By doing so, the new istio-operator can get the leader lease and become 1/1 Ready status.
~~~
$ oc delete configmap istio-operator-lock
configmap "istio-operator-lock" deleted
~~~