Ask HN: Are Service Meshes an Antipattern?

Service mesh solutions like Istio and Linkerd are gaining a lot of traction in the industry. However, it seems to me like they are predicated on what I always though was a microservices antipattern i.e. a synchronous chain of microservices calling each other (as opposed to the prescribed "right way" i.e. all inter-service communication is asynchronous through some sort of messaging). I am hesitant to outright dismiss them looking at the hype and adoption. What am I missing here, are they just helping people make their mistakes more easily?