Component(s)

No response

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The API packages v1alpha1 and v1beta1 include imports of external and shared components, such as sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime.
This design makes it challenging to import these API packages into other projects.

For instance, both github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator and sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime are direct dependencies of one of our components. As a result, we are required to use the same version of controller-runtime as the opentelemetry-operator, especially when breaking changes are introduced.
This issue recently arose when controller-runtime (version v0.23.0) modified some webhook interfaces, leading to the following error during our upgrade:

pkg/client/kubernetes/types.go:14:24: could not import github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator/apis/v1alpha1 (/Users/tim/go/pkg/mod/github.com/open-telemetry/[email protected]/apis/v1alpha1/convert.go:15:2: could not import github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator/apis/v1beta1 (-: # github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator/apis/v1beta1                                                                               
../../../../pkg/mod/github.com/open-telemetry/[email protected]/apis/v1beta1/collector_webhook.go:448:34: not enough arguments in call to ctrl.NewWebhookManagedBy                                                           
        have (controllerruntime.Manager)                                                                                                                                                                                                   
        want (manager.Manager, T))) (typecheck)                                                                                                                                                                                            
        opentelemetryv1alpha1 "github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator/apis/v1alpha1"
                              ^

Describe the solution you'd like

As #4362 (comment) already mentioned, the API packages should not bring any transitive dependencies, or as few as possible.

After the discussion in #4362, this issue is somehow a duplicate but describes the issue again from the beginning and generally.
Please feel free to close either of them.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

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