Thank you, I think the "less heavy than managing a local micro-k8s cluster"-part was a great portion of what I was missing here.

I've wondered myself and asked here https://lemmy.world/post/20435712 – got some very reasonable answers

Thank you for those very convincing points. I think I'll give it a try at some point. It seems to me that what you're getting in return for writing quadlet configuration in addition to the kubernetes style pod/container config is that you don't need to maintain an independent kubernetes distro since podman and systemd take care of it and allow for system-native management. This makes a lot of sense.

Understood, thanks, but if I may ask, just to be sure: It seems to me that without interacting with the kubernetes layer, I'm not getting pods, only standalone containers, correct? (Not that I'm afraid of writing kube configuration, as others have inferred incorrectly. At this point, I'm mostly curious how this configuration would be looking, because I couldn't find any examples.)