Hello folks,
The 1.16 release branch cut is planned for today, Monday 10/17.
After that point, only changes cherry-picked into release-1.16 will be included in the release, barring some last minute exceptions (please post in Slack in #lreease-1_16 for these), no new features will be merged.
For more information, check out the 1.16 Release wiki page at Istio Release 1.16 · istio/istio Wiki · GitHub
Thanks,
Daniel, on behalf of the 1.16 Release Managers