The problem is that if you configure a specific IP-address (other than 127.0.0.1) in confd.conf, you can’t (per standard socket semantics) connect to it with 127.0.0.1 as target address (which is what netconf-console does per default, as can be seen from the “Failed to connect to localhost” error).
I.e. either configure the wildcard address like the examples do for the SSH transport, i.e. <ip>0.0.0.0</ip> (but use only loopback <ip>127.0.0.1</ip> for TCP transport since there is no authentication) - or give the specific IP address you configured with the --host option to netconf-console, e.g. --host=192.168.1.1.