Does the Ingress Gateway require the full service mesh?

Does the Ingress Gateway require the presence of the full Istio Service Mesh? e.g. does the internal service being exposed through the Gateway require a service mesh sidecar?

It doesn’t require services to be part of the service mesh, but you won’t be able to take advantage of all features istio offers, such as mutual TLS, advanced traffic routing, etc. It does, however let you slowly migrate services into your mesh.