This startled me too in the beginning. I was expecting something built in, pre-wired to one of the commercial cdn/reverse proxy offerings (like cloudfront or Azure CDN).

But honestly I think the big cloud providers don’t want their kubernetes offerings to be too easy to use, they try to nudge inexperienced people to use their proprietary serverless products. Kubernetes does make switching to another cloud provider far too easy ;)

AWS used to have an integrated Ingress Controller - It just sucked (At least partially because it was built by Google, not AWS). That AWS didn't take over hosting of it (it's not even available as an add-on!) when Kubernetes the Project removed the first-party support of it is... Well, it's a statement by AWS. They were dragged kicking and screaming into Kubernetes at all, because they see it as hurting their moat, and have stalled the Ingress project quite a bit.

GKE does ship with both Ingress and Gateway controllers integrated, they set up GCP load balancers with optional automatic TLS certificates.

I think you need to flip a flag on the cluster object to enable the Gateway controller.