[SaveTheRbtz]

Totally get it! The team (@veshji and @euroelessar) struggled a bit in convincing me that the new Envoy way is a simpler one. I do not regret giving in.

Operationally, there are many differences (esp. around Observability) but if I were to distill it down to one thing it is a clean separation between data- and control-plane. This basically means that it was designed to be automated and the automation layer (xDS) itself runs just like any other normal service in production.