I have to admit, the biggest selling point to me for podman is the removal of the central docker daemon. For my use case (personal workstation and home lab), it seems strange to me that I need essentially another service manager for these processes just because I want to slap them in a container. It definitely makes sense that there would still be some gaps though as it's a less mature product.
You've definitely convinced me to take a good look at LXC/LXD though. Thanks for the thorough response!
It should be noted that (unlike Docker), LXD can be safely killed and upgraded without your containers dying -- which is the main problem most people have with Docker's container liveliness model (even with Docker's --live-restore there are many issues). The main reason why LXD has a daemon is that it supports lots of management features (such as live migration and clustering) which cannot easily be done without a daemon.
You can use LXC directly if you want to avoid a long-running daemon.
You've definitely convinced me to take a good look at LXC/LXD though. Thanks for the thorough response!