When running rs.status or rs.conf, we will observe the current version of the replica set:

			"configVersion" : 88889

The same information can be found in the local.system.replset collection.

The problem is every time there is a reconfiguration of the replicaset, this number is incremented hundreds of times. If we do the reconfig with force:true it grows more than 100K this value can grow by thousands

Since it is an ever-increasing value, this can eventually lead to the:

mongo> rs.reconfig(cfg, {"force": true} );
{
"ok" : 0,
"errmsg" : "version field value of 2147494497 is out of range",
"code" : 103,
"codeName" : "NewReplicaSetConfigurationIncompatible"
}

The workaround is changing the version in the local collection with the command:

db.system.replset.update({"_id": "replset"}, {$set: {"version":1}})

And restart the replica set. I wonder why the version is not incremented by one (version++). In this way, the version would virtually never expire since the maximum value is ~2billion.