Service meshes shouldn’t by-in-large require any sort of dev-specific knowledge to participate in.

My experience is limited to istio but tagging a deployment is more or less all an engineer needs to know. After that a sidecar is attached that rewrites ip traffic and gives you better observability, mutual TLS encrypted transports and obviously http routing / traffic control.

Obviously to take advantage of a lot of policy capabilities an engineer would need to know or declare their dependencies but I hardly think this is something that has a cognitive overhead that the author seems to imply.