How does Cassandra driver update contactPoints if all pods are restarted in Kubernetes without restarting the client application?
In a complete outage, you're right, the application will not have any valid endpoints for the cluster. Those will need to be refreshed (and the app restarted) before the app will connect to Cassandra.
We actually wrote a RESTful API that we can use query current, valid endpoints by cluster. That way, the app teams can find the current IPs for their cluster at any time. I recommend doing something similar.