Merge pull request #19957 from spowelljr/fixPanic #3694

Job	Run time
build_minikube	8m 18s
lint	2m 42s
build_minikube_test_binaries	4m 1s
unit_test	1m 53s
functional_baremetal_ubuntu22_04	5m 13s
functional_docker_ubuntu	6m 40s
functional_docker_containerd_ubuntu	8m 29s
functional_docker_rootless_containerd_ubuntu	11m 12s
functional_podman_ubuntu	10m 1s
upload_all_reports	8s
	58m 37s

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