I read the entire manual and still have no idea what the user experience looks like once connected. How do I reach the connected nodes? ZEroTier DNS? IP? Do I pass the ZeroTier ID directly to my network stack and it’s accepted and interpreted?
Have you set up subnets on a Network before? If you have it's like that.
It creates a subnet any IP within the subnet range will route to your virtual network. It shows up as a Network device on your computer, as if you had another NIC.
The ID is used to connect to the Network. It plays the role a domain would play when connecting to a VPN.
You could set up an internal DNS server like you can do with other internal subnets but it's optional. When I used Zero Tier it didn't have a DNS layer so you'd have to do it yourself with Bind/a DNS server/something, not sure if it does now.
But out of frustration from tailscale we tried it, and once you get it, it's easy