Half of the point of podman was to avoid the need to run things with root.

Docker compose expects me to have a server running. While I technically could run "podman system service" and configure docker compose to point at a non-standard socket or port in order to run it I would really prefer not to have that kind of headache just to run a script.

Docker compose was also written by docker and exhibits similar levels of shoddiness to docker. The accumulation of bad design decisions by docker is, indeed, why podman exists in the first place. With a little bit of love podman compose could easily surpass docker compose.