Hello,

It seems that the image-reflector-controllers reconciler is always returning the result and error object without checking whether the error is not nil.
I do see these messages upon error:

Warning: Reconciler returned both a non-zero result and a non-nil error. The result will always be ignored if the error is non-nil and the non-nil error causes reqeueuing with exponential backoff. For more details, see: https://pkg.go.dev/sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime/pkg/reconcile#Reconciler

I suggest to change this:

to something like this:

if retErr != nil {
  return nil, retErr
}

return result, nil

Same can be applied for the imagepolicy controller:

There might be other flux components doing the same, but I didn't check them.