We've been using podman compose for semi-production purposes at our company and that's been our experience as well. It's just... it's really rough, there are a ton of "known" issues, and it's rather unreliable. As a result, I've been really trying to push the "just use the docker daemon in prod instead" (to no avail... yet).
Not op, but the suggestion is likely to use Podman Desktop during local container development. Then switch to the docker runtime in production systems (ec2 etc.)
Podman and Docker Engine are both OCI runtimes. The theory being that containers reproducablly run across different runtimes without changes in behavior.
