The Kiali CR reference doc is confusing some people because all the little example yamls in the individual sections do not specify the full yaml of the section (for example, see #8217 (comment)).
Go through the https://github.com/kiali/kiali-operator/blob/v2.6.0/crd-docs/crd/kiali.io_kialis.yaml file and update all the examples so they avoid this confusion by specifying the yaml starting at spec level.
For example, change this to be:
spec: #<<<--- add this line
deployment: #<<<--- add this line
custom_secrets:
- name: mysecret
mount: /mysecret-path
- name: my-other-secret
mount: /my-other-secret-location
optional: true