Default gateway : Where do teh packets go?

when one sets up a network in docker does the default gateway send packets to the host ? Is it possible to capture these packets in anyway and redirect them via IP tables or the linux IPRoute2 stuff ?

I’m asking this as I am presently playing with the Traefik/Nginx-Proxy container. The host machine hosts my main website, domain.tld, and I would like to have containers made available within docker exposed via subdomains as in sub.domain.tld. I need NginX on the host to split any *.domain.tld traffic to the Nginx-Proxy/Traeffic container while still serving domain.tld from the host. I think I can do this via IP-transparency in NginX but need to confirm this is the case by capturing the packets sent to the default gateway and forwarding them to NginX on the host.

What I’ve since figured out is that the network setup by docker will have the subnet 172.18.0.0/16. All traffic seems to exit via the default gateway 172.0.0.1 which is really the host machine.

If one binds the ports of the container to the a loopback host e.g. 127.0.0.2 then the packets returned to the client still seems to be passed through the 172.0.0.1 interface, which seems a bit weird. I setup the following in a default server block in NginX to try and work out where the traffic was routed from

location / {
  return 200 "<HTML>Hello from $hostname. You connected from $remote_addr:$remote_port to $server_addr:$server_port\n<HTML>";
  add_header Content-Type text/plain;
}

This would largely return the default gateway in the response for the $emote_addr.

I could not get IP-transparency working in the end via NginX. Either way my original question was vague and ill-defined. I came here to close the question more as note for myself as I doubt this will be useful to another user.
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