Agree service meshes today need extensive configuration to make it production ready. My opinion is that service meshes are still not mature enough. Many products are built as a layer on top of istio (check solo.io or ambassador, or knative), but are still complex to manage, and require some basic envoy proxy knowledge.
Will they be integrated with kubernetes and fade in the background? definitely not, not even close.
If all your experience is with Istio and "layers on top of Istio", I'm not surprised you think service meshes need lots of config. Sounds like you need to try Linkerd!
