When manageJob() needs to create replacement pods but defers creation
because a pod-failure backoff is still active, it returned a hardcoded
active=0 to the caller. Because no pods were actually created or deleted,
this left Status.Active=0 while Status.Ready still reflected the running
pods. The apiserver correctly rejects such updates ("cannot set more
ready pods than active") with a 422, which blocks flushing uncounted
terminated pods, removing finalizers, and updating job status, leaving
pods stuck Terminating with stale status.
Return the real active count from both backoff early-returns instead,
since the deferral does not change the number of active pods.
Issue: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/139428
2fe49b0cd0