I haven’t seen anyone doing this before, so really great to see your progress! Sorry to hear you’re now stuck with the redirects though.
I might have ran into something similar on Friday with a different application. I wonder if we have something misconfured with the redirections between istio and dex. I think once you authenticate you should receive an AUTHSERVICE_TOKEN (or similar, I might remember the name wrong). If you attach that cookie manually in your browser (using maybe a browser extension for cookies), it might let you browse directly to the dashboard instead of getting redirected a second time.
I’ll also look into this. I don’t know if I have a way of testing with the Microsoft setup though.