The daemon has always been running since the introduction of proxmox-firewall, but it does not do anything until you explicitly enable nftables in the settings.
The manual says we can enable nftables by setting the nftables:1 option
My freshly loaded PVE 8.4 box doesn't have a /etc/pve/nodes/<node_name>/host.fw file, however when I execute "systemctl status proxmox-firewall" the system reports...