My advice is to spend it where it matters. I took over a data center project. It’s really a software development environment. They implemented istio when nginx would have worked just fine. Only needed ingress controller and nothing crazy for what this is. There is a VM that runs nginx and it is the reverse proxy for Atlassian tools running in VMs. But we have NSX-T which can handle this so no need for a separate nginx reverse proxy.

Point is my predecessors made things too complicated by chasing shiny things instead of using what is native in our environment to get the job done and simple maintenance