Hi community, I deployed a gke cluster following the guide something like below

export const cluster = new gcp.container.Cluster(NAME, {
  initialNodeCount: INITIAL_NODE_COUNT,
  minMasterVersion: engineVersion,
  nodeVersion: engineVersion,
  nodeConfig: {
    machineType: MACHINE_TYPE,
    oauthScopes: OAUTH_SCOPES,
    tags: [NETWORKTAG]
  },
  networkingMode: 'VPC_NATIVE',
  ipAllocationPolicy: {
    clusterIpv4CidrBlock: '',
    servicesIpv4CidrBlock: ''
  }
});

and when I try to upgrade the machineType by passing in a different value. THE WHOLE CLUSTER IS DESTROYED AND RECREATED? is it an expected behaviour? I would expect it just resize the node machine and retain the the cluster

Yes, this is expected behaviour. That part of the GCP Api is immutable. If you want to have a configurable type on the nodes, create a separate node pool with the node pool resource