K8s abstracted out containerization in preparation for the anticipated long term migration of the ecosystem to Podman et al (lots and lots of people are invested in moving "containers" away from "Docker").
I don't think podman is designed or supported as a CRI. It's for local development. You can create local "pods" without an API server, but not running containers on a real Kubernetes node. That would be containerd, crio, or cri-dockerd.
With that said I still prefer docker for local development by creating real ephemeral clusters with kind
With that said I still prefer docker for local development by creating real ephemeral clusters with kind