Is the legacy namespace special?

On the Istio Authentication Policy webpage, three namespaces are created and then identical pods created in each namespace. But the pods in the legacy namespace do not have the istio sidecar injected.

Per kubectl get namespace -L istio-injection only the default namespace in my kubernetes cluster has istio-injection enabled.

Is there something in the istio code that treats the legacy namespace specially? I’ve not found it in the docs.
If not, can anyone explain why legacy does not get the sidecar injected?