The official documentation is missing on how to configure SMCP for automatic sidecar injection as part of to SMCP CR:

 
https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.14/service_mesh/v2x/prepare-to-deploy-applications-ossm.html
https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.14/service_mesh/v2x/ossm-create-smcp.html
 
The following needs to be added to the CR for automatic injection to be working (apart from annotation of the deployment):
 
apiVersion: maistra.io/v2
kind: ServiceMeshControlPlane
metadata:
  name: basic
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  version: v2.4
  tracing:
    type: Jaeger
    sampling: 10000
  proxy:
    injection:
      autoInject: true
...