That's a pretty cool migration story! I've been meaning to give podman a more serious look. The OCI image format issue is good to know about – hadn't considered that compatibility angle. I'm curious, did you notice any performance differences in your CI builds after switching?
Its been a while, so all my telemetry has since expired, but there was no meaningful difference in time.
I was prepared to roll it all back, but I never ended up running into problems with it. It's just something that happens in the background that I don't have to think about.