I won't deny that the outdated repos was a pain in the past, but ever since ubuntu got to version 4 it's been working flawlessly for me.
I think version 4 was where podman became a reliable tool, whereas I found it to be flaky and unreliable in previous versions.
I don't use vs code extensions for managing my containers, so I can't say much about those, but I wonder if many of them won't work fine with an alias for docker and maybe the podman-socket running.