[FridgeSeal]

Neither Cilium nor Hubble are service meshes.

Cilium is a CNI - the functionality that provides the K8s cluster inter-pod networking. The fact that it uses eBPF to deliver its functionality is what gives it the impressive observability you usually only get from a service mesh. I agree that not everyone needs a service mesh.

[nullify88]

You are right that cilium is a CNI but one of its many features is also providing a sidecar-less service mesh using eBPF. https://cilium.io/use-cases/service-mesh/