In April 2026, the team delivered a focused enhancement to the kubernetes-sigs/kueue project to address orphaned workloads and improve requeue behavior. The Kueue Orphaned Workloads Handling and Requeue Gate introduces a guard to requeue workloads only when their controller owner still exists, preventing stale workloads from consuming cluster quotas. It also introduces the FinishOrphanedWorkloads feature gate, expands tests, and updates the integration and unit tests to validate orphan detection and ownership checks. Additional improvements include finishing admitted workloads when the owning Job is deleted and deferring cascade-orphan handling to a follow-up, reducing race conditions with GC. Together, these changes improve stability, reliability, and resource efficiency in large clusters.