Podman with pods is a better experience than docker-compose. It's easy to interactively create a pod and add containers to it. The containers ports will behave as if they were on the same machine. Then `podman generate kube` and you have a yaml file that you can run with `podman kube play`.
Rootless networking is very slow unless you install `passt`. With Debian, you probably should install every optional package that podman recommends.
The documentation is lacking. Officially, it's mostly man pages, with a few blog posts announcing features, though the posts are often out of date.
Podman with its docker socket is often compatible with Docker. Even docker-compose can (usually) work with podman. I've had a few failures, though.
Gitlab-runner can use podman instead of docker, but in this case the is no network aliases. So it's useless if the runner needs to orchestrate several images (e.g. code and db).