Actually setting up rootless Docker is pretty manual and kludgy. With Podman, rootless is pretty much effortless.

Wow. It seems really clunky indeed: https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/

Check your distribution's documentation for the easy way.

Been using it without any issues for years.

Very few distros ship the extras required for it. If yours doesn't, you'll have some extra manual steps to set it up.