I personally prefer podman, due to its rootless mode being "more default" than in docker (rootless docker works, but it's basically an afterthought).
That being said: there's just so many tutorials, tools and other resources that assume docker by default that starting with docker is definitely the less cumbersome approach. It's not that podman is signficantly harder or has many big differences, but all the tutorials are basically written with docker as the first target in mind.
In my homelab the progression was docker -> rootless docker -> podman and the last step isn't fully done yet, so I'm currently running a mix of rootless docker and podman.
That's probably not a popular opinion here, but: parents do not have a right to their child. If the child was cool with this, then that is the important part (and from what I read I'd guess he would be).
Let's posit it the other way around: a deeply religious pair of parents raises a kid that ends up being strongly anti-religion and comes to some "fame" due to that. Would you describe those celebrating that kid as "cunts" as well? And if not: why?
And no, I'm not religious myself and think a lot of that stuff is stupid and much of it is dangerous, but "those parents deserve better" is an argument that's used in exactly the opposite way in other areas: to oppress kids that don't "submit to the norm" that their parents think are best.