Relax the certifi lower bound and stop Dependabot raising lower bounds

[sayaksatpathi]

What type of PR is this?

/kind bug

What this PR does / why we need it:

Dependabot raised certifi from >=14.05.14 to >=2026.7.22 (#2660), so the client can't be installed next to an application that pins an older certifi. The client only calls certifi.where(), which every release provides.

• requirements.txt: lower the bound to certifi>=2024.7.4. That is the oldest release with no known advisory (CVE-2024-39689 was fixed in 2024.7.4, checked against OSV), so it unblocks the reporter while keeping the bundles with the removed roots out.
• .github/dependabot.yml: set versioning-strategy: widen for pip, as discussed in the issue. By default Dependabot treats requirements.txt like an application and raises the lower bound on every release. With widen, which is supported for pip, a >= range is left alone when the new release already satisfies it.

Which issue(s) this PR fixes:

Fixes #2733

Special notes for your reviewer:

Other lower bounds in requirements.txt were raised the same way (pydantic, setuptools, typing-extensions, urllib3, durationpy). I left them alone to keep this focused, and can relax them in a follow-up if you want.

Verification (certifi 2024.10.17 from the issue isn't on PyPI, so I used the nearest releases):

• pip install --dry-run . certifi==2024.8.30 and certifi==2024.7.4 fail with a resolution conflict on master and resolve with this change. certifi==2024.2.2 is still rejected.
• With certifi 2024.7.4 installed, the unit tests under kubernetes/config, stream, watch, utils, leaderelection, informer and kubernetes/test give 290 passed. The 8 failures are Windows-only (7 ws_client tests patch select.poll, and 1 timing assertion in incluster_config_test) and fail the same way with certifi 2026.7.22.

I used Claude Code (AI) to help investigate and write this change, and reviewed and tested it before submitting.

Does this PR introduce a user-facing change?

The certifi requirement is relaxed to certifi>=2024.7.4, so the client can be installed alongside applications that pin an older certifi.

Additional documentation e.g., KEPs (Kubernetes Enhancement Proposals), usage docs, etc.:

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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[sayaksatpathi]

/easycla

[yliaog]

/assign @lexdene

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In response to this:

/assign @lexdene

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[sayaksatpathi]

@lexdene this lowers the certifi floor you asked about in #2733 to >=2024.7.4 and sets Dependabot to widen. Could you confirm it installs alongside your pinned certifi?