I think many of these issues are also solved by Podman and systemd depending on what kind of "production" you're building for. If you're building a linux-y appliance and you need to run a few containers I think Podman is a much better and more ergonomic way of doing so. I think perhaps that's less true for running a web service (where the linux environment is just a means to that end).
Yes, I recommend this: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/kubernetes-workloads-podman-s...
Is there a nice guide for podman that includes quadlets (or saying not to use them?) I find lots of guides stray into things that work on redhat, and on my Linuxes of choice, Raspbian and Ubuntu, things aren't straightforward.
What are the benefits of running Podman Compose instead of Docker Compose? I don't see how it helps with orphan containers, logs and mutable tags.