In my limited experience, when Podman seems more complicated than Docker, it’s because the Docker daemon runs as root and can by default do stuff Podman can’t without explicitly giving it permission to do so.

Can't argue with that. There's some truth to this.

99% of the stuff self-hosters run on regular rootful Docker can run with no issues using rootless Podman.

If this figure was even close to being remotely true, everyone would have moved to rootless containers by now.

Rootless Docker is an option, but my understanding is most people don’t bother with it. Whereas with Podman it’s the default.

These two share the same set of problems. People don't want to downgrade from a "working" docker to a rootless "safer" docker that comes with more usability headaches.

Docker is good, Podman is good. It’s like comparing distros, different tools for roughly the same job.

Not really. The two are really different underneath but on surface they may look like they are overlapping solutions to the untrained eye.

Pods are a really powerful feature though.

Last time I was giving podman a try, I didn't find anything really special about pods. Maybe it just didn't click for me or I was not the intended audience.