You're right, it's both easier and simpler since no daemons are involved. podman-compose has the same command-line interface and has worked ok for me so far (maybe 3 or 4 years at this point).
Also I really don't care if docker has a daemon or not, for me it offers feature like auto starting containers without bothering with SystemD, and auto updates using watchtower and the docker socket.
And since podman doesn't have an official distro package repo like docker, you are stuck use whatever old version shipped in your distro without recent improvements, which is important for a very active development project.
Bingo, the "pain" of the daemon (it's never cause a single problem for me? Especially on Linux, on macOS I've occasionally had to go start it because it wasn't running, but BFD) saves me from having to touch systemd. Or, indeed, from caring WTF distro I'm running and which init system it uses at all.
Hmm... https://github.com/containers/podman
I found that on: https://podman.io/ so, I'm pretty sure it's official.