podman-compose never worked very well for me, so I'm running with the podman.socket systemd service and the standalone version of docker-compose. That is however working flawlessly.
What I really like about podman (and which to be fair docker might have since catched up on) is that rootless containers work so well. Gone are the days where bind-mounting a project folder into a container would mess with your file permissions.
In my experience podman also feels easier and less invasive to install, although I can't say if the latter is really the case.
Otherwise it honestly is great and preferable over Docker.
I think version 4 was where podman became a reliable tool, whereas I found it to be flaky and unreliable in previous versions.
I don't use vs code extensions for managing my containers, so I can't say much about those, but I wonder if many of them won't work fine with an alias for docker and maybe the podman-socket running.