It will never be production ready outside their IBM OS, as they don't even support LTS Debian.
There's still https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/lib... , but it's not what one could consider production ready. Example of why: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/5102#issuecommen...
The build from source instructions work and you can easily maintain your own back ports / PPAs for things like that as the standard mechanism for major upgrades which the core distribution doesn’t want to commit to supporting. Usually you can simply take the updated package definition from the unstable repository and build that, and a quick search suggests many people are doing just that.
So on the surface - if you're making the decision to try it now, at least - it doesn't seem that supporting Debian 10 is that big a deal. I guess if you've been on Debian 10 for ages & wanting to use Podman that could easily have been a dealbreaker though, but as someone looking to switch out from Docker it looks like it should be fine on the next Debians?
I generally kind of see this as a good thing, in that you can assume (or at least, hope) you're getting some extra stability because of this, but it's just as often frustrating when you're missing some key feature that came out a couple years ago because the repo version is old.