It's probably people using podman incorrectly. You can sudo with podman but you don't have to. Check out a recent talk on podman from the last Kubecon by Dan Walsh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIM0HwWLJ7g&t=1885).

Also, another benefit of podman is that it doesn't use the client-server model, it's just fork+exec no daemon needed. Dan has a bunch of talks that are great introductions to podman and container security in general:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE2nI1SwSVk

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msdaf3lBOn0

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkBk52MGV0Y

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40ynATurI7k

[EDIT] - I did not realize that non-root podman was a 1.0 feature -- as others have noted, podman <1.0 required sudo.