But even for small-scale single-node production use cases, I suspect that podman-compose with systemd doesn't have the same concerns as docker-compose does. Since you're registering the workload with systemd, it'll restart with the node as easily as any other service, and rootless containers are a big win for security.

Where you can't keep using (podman|docker)-compose is when you have to scale up a service beyond a single node.