I agree with a lot of what you say. Tbh, this is also why we are advocates of app-embedded ZTNA. You get mTLS (and way, way more) out of the box, without the overhead, and its super easy to run your K8S or non-K8s workloads anywhere. No need for VPNs, inbound FW ports, complex ACLs, L4 loadbalancers, public DNS and more. It is thus much easier to build distributed systems which are secure by default from network attacks.
TL:DR, we believe service meshes introduce complexity with control plane synchronization, service discovery challenges, and network overlays. A Global Overlay removes Kubernetes service dependencies and shifting networking to a Zero Trust, software-defined global overlay which is much simpler, automated and secure.
Super curious to get your thoughts.
In my opinion, Kubernetes networking is flawed, in that service mesh authentication with mTLS has unnecessary overhead, Cilium network policies are clumsy using labels and work poorly with non-pod workloads (i.e. CIDR-based policies), multi-cluster is hacky, and external workloads are inconvenient to set up. So a simple plug-and-play solution that solves these problems would be great.