Unable to perform simple SF cluster upgrade due to NodesToBeRemoved section

Question

I have a standalone Service Fabric cluster which was been running without issues for a while. I have tried to do a simple cluster upgrade which only updates the ClusterConfigurationVersion, however I am stuck.

My process is the following:

1. Get the current cluster configuration

Get-ServiceFabricClusterConfiguration | Out-File clusterconfiguration.json

2. Open the clusterconfiguration.json file and update the version before, e.g. from 2.0.0 set to "ClusterConfigurationVersion": "2.1.0"

3. Start a new upgrade

Start-ServiceFabricClusterConfigurationUpgrade -ClusterConfigPath .\clusterconfiguration.json

This errors out with the following message:

Start-ServiceFabricClusterConfigurationUpgrade : System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (-2147017627) ValidationException: Model validation error. Nodes have been removed from the JSON config but NodesToBeRemoved parameter does not contain NodeName for all removed nodes. Please ensure NodesToBeRemoved parameter is specified in Setup section inside FabricSettings and node names of all nodes which need to be removed from the cluster are mentioned.

Upon a closer look I see that there is indeed a NodesToBeRemoved section in my cluster configuration:

{
    "Name": "NodesToBeRemoved",
    "Value": "somenodeX"
}

However I don't think I ever intended to remove this node. Also, this node is part of my cluster (although with a different casing, somenodeX vs SomeNodeX). I do not wish to remove this node though.

If I remove the nodes to be removed section then I get this error:

Start-ServiceFabricClusterConfigurationUpgrade : System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (-2147017627) ValidationException: Model validation error. Nodes have been removed from the JSON config but NodesToBeRemoved parameter does not contain NodeName for all removed nodes. Please ensure NodesToBeRemoved parameter is specified in Setup section inside FabricSettings and node names of all nodes which need to be removed from the cluster are mentioned.

Do you know how I can un-brick the cluster upgrade process?