when should i consider a service mesh for my microservices tho

ive been running more and more microservices and honestly the upkeep is getting tough. like talking between services, watching whats going on, and keeping things safe feel like a bigger headache than building the actual services. ive heard about service meshes like istio and linkerd but they seem like a lot. is there a point where the extra complexity is actually worth it for handling traffic, retries, and seeing whats happening better. when did you guys find a service mesh actually helped out