Your goals seem to somewhat align with the podman project, except that they decided to make a drop in replacement for docker (to the point you can alias docker

Your goals seem to somewhat align with the podman project, except that they decided to make a drop in replacement for docker (to the point you can alias docker to podman) and leverage the docker ecosystem, and still use orchestration to build pods, etc. Notably, it's no longer a daemon, just some python scripts that do the same thing docker did. Also, as good as systemd is (and I've defended it here a few times as better than what was before), it still feels like an organically grown accumulation of edge cases that were patched. I try to keep it's use to the subset of features that are easy to grow for not just myself but those of my team, and systemd is known (in my circles at least) as being somewhat obtuse. For me, that's a good argument for a dedicated application to handle it.