Istio's profiles provide a convenient way of having preconfigured Installation options for different use cases, including OpenShift, Ambient Mesh, etc. This is helpful when users are learning Istio or creating a PoC and want to have a pre-baked setup for a specific use case. Using a profile is easier than having to figure out how to configure many Istio settings manually. 

Upstream documentation: https://istio.io/latest/docs/setup/additional-setup/config-profiles/