When running cp -R ../anthos-config-example/namespaces/audit ./namespaces/ in Creating Anthos Configurations it is important to make sure you don't have a trailing slash on audit (such as the one put there by a tab auto-complete) or the namespace.yaml will be in ./namespaces/ rather than ./namespaces/audit/.
This causes Anthos to ignore the contents of the namespaces directory (possible bug?) so you won't get a pod. Maybe add a verification step after the relevant git push to see if the namespace audit is created before continuing.