I am trying to understand the difference between pods and annotations.

Standard documentation says that annotations captures “non-identifying information”.
While on labels, selectors can be applied. Labels are used to organise objects in kubernetes cluster.

If this is the case then why istio use pod annotations instead of labels for various different settings : https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/annotations/

Isn’t label is good approach ?

Just trying to understand what advantages does annotations provide, if istio developers chose to use annotations.