UFW and Docker don't work well together. Both of them call iptables (or nftables) in a way that assumes they're in control of most of the firewall, which means they can conflict or simply not notice each other's rules. For instance, UFW's rules to block all traffic get overriden by Docker's rules, because there is no active block rule (that's just the default, normally) and Docker just added a rule. UFW doesn't know about firewall chains it didn't create (even though it probably should start listing Docker ports at some point, Docker isn't exactly new...) so `ufw list` will show you only the manually configured UFW rules.

What happens when you deny access through UFW and permit access through Docker depends entirely on which of the two firewall services was loaded first, and software updates can cause them to reload arbitrarily so you can't exactly script that easily.

If you don't trust Docker at all, you should move away from Docker (i.e. to podman) or from UFW (i.e. to firewalld). This can be useful on hosts where multiple people spawn containers, so others won't mess up and introduce risks outside of your control as a sysadmin.

If you're in control of the containers that get run, you can prevent container from being publicly reachable by just not binding them to any public ports. For instance, in many web interfaces, I generally just bind containers to localhost (-p 127.0.0.1:8123:80 instead of -p 80) and configure a reverse proxy like Nginx to cache/do permission stuff/terminate TLS/forward requests/etc. Alternatively, binding the port to your computer's internal network address (-p 192.168.1.1:8123:80 instead of -p 80) will make it pretty hard for you to misconfigure your network in such a way that the entire internet can reach that port.

Another alternative is to stuff all the Docker containers into a VM without its own firewall. That way, you can use your host firewall to precisely control what ports are open where, and Docker can do its thing on the virtual machine.

I'm not sure about ufw/firewalld. Maybe docs aren't clear there either

I configured iptables and had no trouble blocking WAN access to docker...

In addition to that there's the default host in daemon.json plus specifying bindings to local host directly in compose / manually.