How to expose Consul UI with API Gateway and HTTPRoute?

[PavelPikat]

Question

I installed Consul Helm chart v1.3.3 in my cluster and enabled UI with ClusterIP (I am using Cloudflare with Tunnels so don't need LoadBalancer with real IPs).
I now want to expose UI to the Internel on DNS something like consul.mydomain.com, and for that I added Gateway resource with HTTP listener and HTTPRoute with hostnames and backendRefs. It looks like this:

apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Gateway
metadata:
  name: api-gateway
  namespace: consul
spec:
  gatewayClassName: consul
  listeners:
  - protocol: HTTP 
    port: 80
    name: http
    allowedRoutes:
      namespaces:
        from: All
---
apiVersion: gateway.networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: HTTPRoute
metadata:
  name: route-consul-ui
spec:
  hostnames:
    - consul.mydomain.com
  parentRefs:
    - name: api-gateway
      namespace: consul
  rules:
    - matches:
        - path:
            type: PathPrefix
            value: /
      backendRefs:
        - kind: Service
          name: consul-ui
          namespace: consul
          port: 80

However, it looks like Consul can't route traffic to a Service if that service is not registered on Consul service catalog, but I am not sure how I register consul Pods in the catalog when the Helm chart excplicitly set annotation on them to disable injector (I guess for a reason, we don't want to inject side to consul server pods).

Okay, so I thought if I can't inject sidecar to consul server pods, then maybe I can register consul-ui Service in Consul catalog directly, by using syncCatalog. I enabled that in the Helm chart and added annotation to the ui:

      ui:
        enabled: true
        # Registers a Kubernetes Service for the Consul UI as a LoadBalancer.
        service:
          enabled: true
          type: ClusterIP
          port:
            http: 80
          annotations: |
            'consul.hashicorp.com/service-sync': 'true'
            'consul.hashicorp.com/service-port': 'http'

This resulted in the new Consul service appearing in the UI called consul-ui-consul. Not sure how I target that in my HTTPRoute though?
Any help would be appreciated.

It's probably worth noting that I am coming from Istio, where routing traffic to services & pods that don't have sidecars is working out of the box by simply adding VirtualService resource. I thought it would be similar with Consul where I could simply add HTTPRoute?

CLI Commands (consul-k8s, consul-k8s-control-plane, helm)

Helm Configuration

Logs

Current understanding and Expected behavior

Environment details

Additional Context