The post is long but it was really written from the POV of an infrastructure owner (DevOps) and not from the POV of a service owner/developer which is actually the target for Linkerd 2.0. FWIW - the post says it takes 5 mins to install Istio. I find that very, very hard to believe.
For different definitions of "installed", I guess. I've been at an Istio workshop and it was less than 5 minutes to have it up and functional. Tweaking it obviously takes longer but that's true for every tool.
Right - meaning live configured Grafana dashboards, TLS up and running, etc - beyond just console stuff.
I’ve tried to install Istio on two clusters (at different points in time) and ran into blockers both times. YMMV.
It took me about 5 minutes and then a few more hours tweaking rules to match what our existing services needed.