I find the podman integrates with systemd well claims a bit dubious.

Last time I checked both podman and CRI-O double fork and have reimplemented process supervision from scratch (through conmon) whilst they could get all those features for free if they didn't daemonize themselves and let systemd handle running things in the background.

I found this very surprising. I still don't understand why they made that choice.

At least they do play nice with the whole "systemd owns the Cgroups tree" story. A thing that was always a bit painful with docker.

Fun note. Systemd-nspawn actually can run OCI containers directly as well these days. However I'm not sure if it's feature-complete