How to prevent Kubelet's garbage collection from removing pinned images?

Issue

• After loading multiple images using podman on a Red Hat Device Edge node with Microshift, a "debug" or troubleshooting image, which is intended to be preserved, is automatically removed from the crio image cache. This debug image is subsequently not listed when checking images with either crictl images or podman images. This behavior is reproducible repeatedly.
  • The issue occurs on a system where the container storage (/var/) is mounted on the /sysroot file system, which experiences high disk utilization > 85%.
  • The automatic removal of these images prevents troubleshooting efforts at customer sites, impacting business operations.