For simple projects, it’s hard to beat
The basic usage of podman quadlets is putting an `app.container` in `/etc/containers/systemd/` containing something like the first snippet and then starting the unit. For someone familiar with systemd, this seems very very nice to work with.
The reliance on systemd is an issue on its own. Much has been said about its intrusion in all aspects of Linux, and I still prefer using distros without it. How can I use this on, say, Void Linux? Standalone Podman does work there, but I'm not familiar if there were some hacks needed to make it work with runit, and if more would be needed for this quadlet feature.
I’ve chosen to embrace systemd and learn it as it is the defacto standard it seems rather than fight what I think is a futile war against it. That being said. I won’t force you to use it if you don’t. But I do not see quadlets using systemd as a failing.
Just call things what they are.
To setup/tear down software dev environments deployed locally, the root/rootless discussion isn't really relevant. Ease of deployment and ease of use are critical though, and Docker is above all a development experience victory.
Podman-compose isn't as good as docker but it exists, and you can run docker-compose with podman as the runtime. I don't need it as my environments are simple and even wrapping the commands in shell scripts would be overkill. But the option is there.
It's worth pointing out that if you're running on Fedora/RHEL then containers are confined to the container_t domain, with a unit per-container MCS label. SELinux policy will prevent a process that has broken out of its namespaces from being able to read/write files from the host or from other containers, or being able to kill or read the memory of or (I'm assuming, haven't checked) ptrace processes from the host or other containers.
If you are concerned that your dev machine is vulnerable but for any reason you decided to not do anything about it, them you might be happy to learn that it's possible to configure Docker to not run as root.
Why would you assume I'm not doing anything about it? Podman is one piece in my hygiene, not allowing npm scripts is another. It does make some things harder and most devs I work with don't even know it's possible and should be done. Assuming you aren't vulnerable and waiting for a problem to appear before solving it is doing it backwards if you ask me. Your kind of self-confidence is what usually gets people.
I could also point docker-compose to the podman socket (it's the default for the podman compose command), if that was something I needed. Pods do it for me these days, which was my initial point. Even though compose is cool it's not really needed and wouldn't add that much for me these days. I've been using podman so long that I don't see the point in going back to docker, changing the default when what I'm using was built to fix that issue to begin with.
What point are you trying to make? I can live without docker.