As explained in the official doc which is also suggested by John Hanley, when you attempt to complete an action that recreates your control plane and nodes, such as completing an ongoing credential rotation, the following problem occurs.
Because GKE has not recreated one or more node pools in your cluster, the operation fails. Node pools are marked for recreation on the backend, but the actual recreation operation may not begin for some time.
The error message is similar to the following:
ERROR: (gcloud.container.clusters.update) ResponseError: code=400, message=Node pool "test-pool-1" requires recreation.
To resolve this issue follow below steps:
Wait for the recreation to happen. This might take hours, days, or weeks depending on factors such as existing maintenance windows and
exclusions, OR
Manually start a recreation of the affected node pools by starting a version upgrade to the same version as the control plane. To start a
recreation, run the following command:
gcloud container clusters upgrade CLUSTER_NAME \
--node-pool=POOL_NAME
After the upgrade completes, try the operation again.