[yabones]

That's totally valid. I understand the desire of k8s maintainers to prevent "cascading changes" from happening, but this one is a very reasonable feature they seem to not support. There's a pretty common hack to make things restart on a config change by adding a pod annotation with the configmap hash:

      annotations:
        checksum/config: {{ include (print $.Template.BasePath "/configmap.yaml") . | sha256sum }}

But I agree that it shouldn't be needed. There should be builtin and sensible ways to notify of changes and react.