> So what’s the ideal setup when using podman? Use compose anyway and hope it won’t be deprecated, or use SystemD as Podman suggests as a replacement for Compose?

After moving from bare to compose to docker-compose to podman-compose and bunch of things in-between (homegrown Clojure config-evaluators, ansible, terraform, make/just, a bunch more), I finally settled on using Nix for managing containers.

It's basically the same as docker-compose except you get to do it with proper code (although Nix :/ ) and as a extra benefit, get to avoid YAML.

You can switch the backend/use multiple ones as well, and relatively easy to configure as long as you can survive learning the basics of the language: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Docker