So, when does a service mesh actually make sense, considering all the extra work it brings?

Hey everyone, I've been thinking a lot about service meshes lately. On one hand, the idea of having all your traffic, monitoring, and security stuff managed from one spot is really nice. Especially when you're dealing with a bunch of microservices. Things like secure communication, stopping cascading failures, and retrying requests automatically, all without touching your app code, sounds amazing. But then I think about how much harder it gets to set up, configure, and keep those control planes and data plane proxies running. It makes me wonder if it's always worth the hassle. For smaller projects, it just seems like too much. And even for big ones, figuring out what went wrong can be a nightmare. So, for those of you actually using it, when did you decide a service mesh was truly needed, and not just another thing to worry about?