api gateway versus direct calls between services?

hey folks, ive been mulling over how best to manage inter-service communication in our microservices setup. weve got a few options: routing everything through an api gateway, or letting services call each other directly. whats your experience been? do you find an api gateway adds too much latency or becomes a bottleneck? or does direct communication lead to a tangled mess of dependencies? curious to hear your real-world trade-offs.