Hello everyone, I'm trying to get mimic what minikube tunnel performs with rancher desktop to access webpage using a nodeport (istio-gateway) any

I don't know, doesn't the "Port forwarding" tab allow you to tunnel your nodeport to the host? The problem is that it just picks a random port on the host; that is still an outstanding improvement request to make that configurable.

Thanks Jan let me give that a try

You can disable traefik from the UI. You may need to stop and restart Rancher Desktop for it to take effect.