I used qemu for a while on my old macbook with a linux vm that had ssh installed. You can actually make docker use a remote machine via ssh and with some environment variable magic you can actually make things like docker-compose work that way. A bit tricky with mounting volumes and forwarding ports of course but you can make that work as well. You can use ssh to forward local ports to a remote machine and you can setup qemu to share directories to the vm. It is a bit tedious to manage but I used this for several months with some scripts to set this up. So, having done this manually, that raises the question why Podman can't do this?

I reverted back to using docker desktop when I got my M1 macbook last year. It's just easier. But it would be nice to have some alternative if the need ever arises. If Podman improves their docker-compose support I might give it another try.