I could very well be wrong but Podman seems to have missed the time-frame of opportunity. It was always a knife fight between Red Hat and Docker with regard to tooling. Red Hat wanting to own the toolchain for containers so they didn't have to deal with, and so they could box out, competitors like (now basically defunct) Docker Enterprise.

I've taken a look at podman from time to time over the years but it seems like it's just never formalized, never been polished and almost always has been sub-par in execution. On this list the builds and container control are things that I've run across. I guess - what's the point? The rootless argument leaned on so heavily is pretty much gone, the quality of Podman hasn't (seemingly) improved and now IBM owns Red Hat (subjective, but a viable concern/consideration given what's recently happened with CentOS).

You're more than safe leveraging Docker and buildkit (when and where needed). Quite honestly, given the relatively poor execution of Red Hat with these tools over the years, I don't see the point. I'm sure there are some niche use cases for Podman/Buildah, but overall it just seems to come up as an agenda more than an exponentially better product at this point. Red Hat could have made things better, instead they just created a distraction and worked against the broader effort in the container ecosystem.