I see people writing this off already in the comments. Probably people who are knee deep in k8s and already have their favorites.
For the 20 year data center guy getting reborn in the cloud, walking down the cereal aisle of service mesh offerings, nginx is going to look like a warm blanket of familiarity.
A cloud-ready/native nginx has very little to do with the old way of configuring nginx. This solution seems to be taking parts of Istio and plugging nginx as the "high-performance proxy" component. The complexity of Istio seems to stay, e.g. centralized PKI managed by operators where if something goes wrong and you don't have deep knowledge of how operators work, your nginx knowledge won't save you.
However, I'd think that this "warm blanket of familiarity" is exactly what F5 are trying to capitalize on. Basically, the name.
For the 20 year data center guy getting reborn in the cloud, walking down the cereal aisle of service mesh offerings, nginx is going to look like a warm blanket of familiarity.