The reason I hated Docker Desktop was simply that I needed to spin up a VM which used up a bunch of memory (yes it's configurable, but I don't want to mess with that. I don't have to on Linux!). I don't believe the podman Mac client solves this problem (nor can it, given it just simply isn't running on a Linux kernel)

On Linux, I quite like Podman! It has a couple of gaps, but for simple things it works great