This component accomplishes that in the following ways:

1. By installing a separate, very basic "CNI plugin" binary onto the node to forward low-level pod lifecycle events (CmdAdd/CmdDel/etc) from whatever node-level CNI subsystem is in use to this node agent for processing via socket.
1. By running as a node-level daemonset that:

Ztunnel was not designed to be a feature-rich data plane.
Quite the opposite - an *aggressively* small feature set is the key feature that makes ztunnel viable.
It very intentionally does not offer L7 (HTTP) functionality, for instance, which would likely violate some of the goals above, without contributing to them.