Try out Colima[0]. I saw someone else mention it on here a few months ago and thought to try it and it's been very good. I did encounter my first problem yesterday so I have moved back to Docker Desktop for now but even if it only worked half the time I'd still suggest it, the memory usage is under a quarter of Docker's offering!
Another thing to try is podman. I run it on my mac and my mac is no longer trying to fly away on the strength of the cooling fans alone.
Podman used to be a bit rough on mac but it's gotten significantly better, especially with podman-desktop. docker-compose even works with it as it does something on the backend to swap out the docker socket. I wouldn't recommend doing podman-compose as it looks to be mostly unmaintained? Or at least no new releases have been cut in a couple of years.