Can Gatling call java junit classes/methods to drive a web application for load testing?

Question

I've been using Gatling gradle plugin to tune a REST API and have found it very easy to construct scenarios and run load/stress tests (admittedly my API is fairly simple). Really happy with the metrics gathering and reports that are generated by Gatling.

I also have a web application (a java monolithic in reality) that I want to load test. It already has a good collection of integration tests (junits that use RMI to invoke headless processes and test changes to the database data) and UI tests (junits which use selenium to drive a browser clicking/entering data via the user pages) which we use to assert functionality remains intact. The junit/selenium testing framework we have developed is pretty feature rich and cover areas such as login, page navigation, data input, checking page data, running batches, checking database updates, checking generated documents, etc.

What I'd like to do is load/performance test some of the functionality that is already covered by these integration/ui tests and have reports generated of how well it performs with x user over y time.

Can Gatling be wired to use my existing Junit code to drive my web application as the user scenarios? Effectively I want Gatling to be able to execute some java methods - which will do all the web app interactions - as part of the user scenerio.

Gatling does support a recorder mode which allows me to capture the HTTP commands called under the hood as I use the web app, but this produces a huge volume of HTTP commands that called under the hood, it doesn't really relate to the what the user is doing. Having already invested the effort into the selenium support.

Any other recommendations for a low-code load testing tool to achieve this?