One thing I want to point out though for anybody not familiar with the differences between podman and docker, for the most part alias docker=podman will "just work" except for these situations:
1. docker-compose. podman-compose attempts to cover this but I've heard it's not quite there yet
2. Mounting the docker socket into the container. Podman is daemonless which means that won't work. There is work going on right now to allow Podman to be driven in a similar way if needed, but I recently tried to set it up and hit a bug[1]. CRI-O brings a daemon, and it is used extensively in Kubernetes and OpenShift, but not so much outside of that.
I've swapped back to docker on Fedora and CentOS by forcibly installing docker on those unsupported platforms because podman-compose doesn't work, containers just didn't work like expected in several situations (forgot detail) and portainer wouldn't work against it.
Either they should have sped up the podman development or shouldn't have deprecated docker at this point. Maybe RedHat just didn't like a third party taking the stewardship in the container business.
On the other hand, I don't think you fully understand where I'm coming from. "Optimizing for stagnation", "stuck on the same plateau". Idk, I just want to run a container. I'm totally fine being on the same Docker plateau if something like Podman makes me re-learn what I already know how to do.
Unlike Git, which, from the start, was different and BETTER than SVN, can you really make the case that Podman would be BETTER if it didn't try to follow Docker conventions? If not, what are we talking about here?