Last time I checked podman compose was only a superficial docker compose equivalent. Also stuff like inotify seems to randomly break a lot on the podman side.
I'd love to be able to recommend people use podman but not having a good docker compose compatibility and missing inotify on volumes makes the DX just too problematic.
Check again? I don't have any issues like this and use podman compose in prod.
You can use actual docker-compose with podman, the -compose projects are separate from podman/docker.
podman-compose never worked well for me but docker-compose on podman did.