lxc never had a daemon but Canonical added one (lxd in 2015) and lxc forked it to incus to be community managed.

rkt (2013) was CoreOS's alternative to Docker and was daemon-less and failed.

Podman came along relatively late (2018) and benefited from a lot of Linux kernel and systemd improvements since Docker was designed.

So while arguably the client/server model is outdated for container management tools, I'm not sure it's weird. This is my workstation for example:

  schmichael@fedora:~$ ps -e -o comm= | rg 'd$' | wc -l
  67

Daemons are maybe the least weird paradigm you can choose for a Unix program.