YAML is way too bloated of a standard and has a ton of inconsistencies between implementations, despite the widespread reputation of simplicity. It is easy to read as long as you limit yourself to a fraction of its capabilities and err on the side of caution when it comes to escaping characters (especially when number literals are involved, or booleans for that matter). As far as alternatives go, I prefer TOML for simple key=value configs, but it has its own issued and is nowhere near as featureful, for better or worse.
Cool attitude. In my experience, most docker/docker-compose setups will work transparently with podman/podman-compose. If you want to tighten security, lock down ressource access, run rootless (daemon and inside the container), integrate with SELinux, then you might need to put in extra-work, just like you would if you used docker.
They aren’t. Podman is mostly just a docker-compatible CLI wrapper around an existing OCI runtime (runc by default). It also lets you manage pods and export k8s yaml, which is arguably the more important industry standard at this point. Podman was also completely usable in rootless mode way before Docker support for that was on the table, which was the main reason I switched years ago. Podman development effort also yielded buildah, which is a godsend if you want to build container images in a containerized environment, without granting docker socket access (which is a security nightmare) or using some docker in docker scenario (which is just a nightmare in general).