as we discussed, hostNetwork does not work with istio-enabled environments.
hostNetwork is therefore enabled in non-istio profile

kube-proxy works as soon as there is connectivity from control plane node to the IP:PORT of what is proxied. I think what happened is the local env misconfig on the side of @AndrejsPon00, possibly some security group or firewall.

okay, I found the reason, here is how it should work:

1. kof-collectors/values.yaml - leave 0.0.0.0:9090
2. kof-child/values.yaml
   collectors/daemon/config

        receivers:
          prometheus:
            api_server:
              server_config:
                endpoint: ${env:OTEL_K8S_NODE_IP}:9090