Because it’s zero configuration auto mtls between all the services in your cluster (or intra-node if cillium) instead of managing a tls cert for every service?
Zero to little configuration at point of use, but a lot of upfront configuration, maintenance, fun issues when you need something slightly less traditional (e.g. something that needs raw TCP or heavens forbid, UDP). Different trade offs for different situations.
At least in our org security let us know when it's time to patch various components and it's typically just a devops chore to bump a helm chart version and merge..
I don't really understand your point; You're trying to say managing a single helm release for istio is more effort than (in my case, for example) manually managing around 40 TLS certificates (and yes, we have an in-house PKI with our own CA that issues via ACME/certbot etc also) and the services that use them? It's clearly not?
Just templating out the config files for e.g Cassandra or ES, or Redis or whatever component takes multiple x the effort of ./helm install istio.
Istio is a notorious pain to maintain, because it has a bunch of dependencies around Kube clusters, so you can't just helm install istio every time there's a new release.
