So even though podman offers a compatible cli interface, if was no help to get compose to work.
podman-compose is a re-implementation of the docker-compose spec in a podman compatible way. Like any re-implementation, compatibility issues are possible.
The main podman project instead chose to tackle such incompatibility by implementing an optional daemon mode offering a compatible to docker REST api.
If you start de podman service on a recent version, you can use docker-compose as-is. It will happily send commands to the podman daemon and from my few initial tests, everything works perfectly so far.
podman-compose is indeed a separate script. I had some bugs with that, but it might be fixed now.
I can't speak for it working for anything beyond basic stuff, because I haven't yet used it for anything complex.
Podman has fairly good support for k8s deployment configurations, which I’ve used as well, if you’re a k8s shop, but I understand there are a lot of places that have standardized on compose for development.