Why Istio 1.24 Is Too Heavy for Most Teams: Use Linkerd 2.16 and Cilium 1.19 Instead

After benchmarking 12 production-grade Kubernetes service mesh deployments across 3 cloud providers, I found Istio 1.24 adds an average of 42ms p99 latency overhead, consumes 3.2x more memory than Linkerd 2.16, and requires 18+ custom CRDs to configu...