Thou idea is cool it product in itself. As you need a k8s person you would need istio person. It has lots of interconnected components, it own configuration primitives (lots of them) and if any of them misconfugured or wonky (looking at you mixer) you will have to spend days debugging it (mixer produce 10k of unreadable logs a second).
It’s great if you know it’s codebase. Not for general case.
The complexity of our world today in the software space is truly astounding. Agreed you would need an istio person, but that can be the same person who is the k8s person. If you have a company with large enough scale to be contemplating istio and service meshes in general; then if Istio makes your life easier in terms of dev ops in general, it might actually be worth it.
It’s great if you know it’s codebase. Not for general case.