Description of problem: The CustomResource created by Service Telemetry Operator for creating an ElasticSearch instance via ECK 1.7.1 no longer works due to the `podTemplate` and other values being marked as empty objects. This is not an issue with ECK 1.6.0.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): STF 1.3, ECK 1.7.1


How reproducible: Always

Actual results:


Expected results:

And ElasticSearch CR should exist with a similar configuration to the following:

spec:
  auth: {}
  http:
    service:
      metadata:
        creationTimestamp: null
      spec: {}
    tls:
      certificate:
        secretName: elasticsearch-es-cert
  nodeSets:
  - config:
      node.data: true
      node.ingest: true
      node.master: true
      node.store.allow_mmap: true
    count: 1
    name: default
    podTemplate:
      metadata:
        labels:
          tuned.openshift.io/elasticsearch: elasticsearch
      spec:
        containers:
        - name: elasticsearch
          resources:
            limits:
              cpu: "2"
              memory: 4Gi
            requests:
              cpu: "1"
              memory: 4Gi
        volumes:
        - emptyDir: {}
          name: elasticsearch-data
  transport:
    service:
      metadata:
        creationTimestamp: null
      spec: {}
    tls:
      certificate: {}
  updateStrategy:
    changeBudget: {}
  version: 7.10.2



Instead, the `podTemplate` parameter is set to `podTemplate: {}`. Other parameters are also set like that, causing ElasticSearch to fail to be spun up.


Additional info: Doing a manual Subscription which sets the approval to manual and a startingCSV of elastic-cloud-eck.v1.6.0 causes everything to work properly, but setting any operator in a namespace to manual causes all operators in that namespace to be set to manual upgrades, meaning we lose our ability to have customers STF deployments automatically upgraded on release.

If an existing ECK with a working CR is upgraded from 1.6.0 to 1.7.1 then the elasticsearch CR is mangled, rendering the deployment invalid.

spec:
  auth: {}
  http:
    service:
      metadata: {}
      spec: {}
    tls:
      certificate:
        secretName: elasticsearch-es-cert
  monitoring:
    logs: {}
    metrics: {}
  nodeSets:
  - config: {}
    count: 1
    name: default
    podTemplate:
      metadata:
        creationTimestamp: null
      spec:
        containers: null
  transport:
    service:
      metadata: {}
      spec: {}
    tls:
      certificate: {}
  updateStrategy:
    changeBudget: {}
  version: 7.10.2