Your Istio setup looks good. I checked it and tested it, in my case everything is fine and I do not see repeated connection attempts.
I also didn't find any bugs that could be related to this configuration.
This behaviour can also be caused by the application itself. Note and make sure the application doesn't have a retry policy on its side. See this example of how something like this can work.
Also make sure that your Istio configuration is correct (hosts, prefix, route) and you check exactly this configuration and not any other configuration. It is also possible that you have set something different than what you wanted and therefore it does not work. The value you received, 3 repetitions, may indicate that Istio is using the default value. See this issue for more information.
If you make sure that your Istio configuration is 100% correct and additionally your application does not use retry anywhere, try to verify the Istio envoy configuration for a specific service using the command istioctl proxy-status <your service>
like in this example. Pay particular attention to point 2 in this paragraph.
If that still doesn't help, try creating a thread on https://discuss.istio.io/.