Is Linux networking fucking drunk or what?

So I have a VPS with an additional static ip. I have a wireguard tunnel. I add a static route to pass that static IP through the tunnel.

This part is fine. I can ping the static IP over the tunnel. Everything is fine on the other side, anyway.

But remote traffic / traffic from the internet cannot reach the IP. It's not firewall. The static IP is definitely routed to this Linux server, so it should be able to accept the incoming traffic and forward it (sysctls are correct, that's not the issue).

So I take a shot in the dark. I add the static IP as an additional loopback address. Still with the static route for the same address saying it goes over Wireguard.

And it fucking works??????

How do I have the IP address literally on a loopback *AND* the traffic for that IP is being routed across the Wireguard tunnel correctly?


WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING LINUX