Changing the max-pods on an active cluster with workloads is generally a safe procedure when target number of max-pods is <=250. When the goal number of max-pods is >250, the additional considerations mentioned above require a deletion of all currently running pods.
If increasing max-pods to >250, there are additional considerations and changes required. The in-cluster IP management configuration needs to be modified as the default is a /16 split into one /24 for each node in the cluster. This comes to a limit of about 256 nodes with roughly 253 pods per node.
--max-pods int32 Default: 110