[jeppester]

One of podman's selling points is that it doesn't need a daemon, and it runs without root privileges.

I'm not familiar enough with the lower level details to know how it works, but it certainly feels less like you are making "a ton of changes to the system" compared to docker

[viraptor]

This. Run podman without a daemon and with host networking and the only "weird" configuration you'll see is the overlay fs. Everything else is quite often an unnecessary overhead.