Contrast with Docker, whose business is explicitly focused on "developer tools."
I could understand this if they were turning the thumbscrews on individuals but all this talk of switching sounds petty and silly and will probably be false economy
Well, with respect to this post in particular, I don't think Podman is even a "real" replacement for Docker Desktop. RHAT has been pushing it for quite a while, and although they're dogfooding it with their own k8s and Linux distros it's had less uptake outside of Big Blue (the linked article, prominently featured on their web page, is already out of date - not a good look). As many rough edges as my Mac using colleagues described encountering with Docker Desktop, they will see even more if they try to use Podman, so it strikes me as a poor choice here.
Regardless, I think the value proposition of Docker Desktop is questionable. The main thing it does is manage some VM plumbing so you don't have to think about it. Is that worth... much? Even anything at all? In a past life many of us used Vagrant, and it's not like it's that hard to do this stuff yourself.
So really, Docker Desktop is competing on multiple fronts, all of which are open source or at least free. There's old school, with Vagrant/BYO VM, there's "docker alternatives" like podman, and there's the k8s-in-a-box like Rancher Desktop or Minikube (which can expose a docker socket so you can work with docker directly as well).
I'm a Linux user so I don't have a dog in this fight, but if I lived in a world where I needed "run a VM to get a docker for development" it's not obvious to me that Docker Desktop is the best choice at any price point, and the cost is just one more point against it.
When Docker started asking for money for their desktop offering, it prompted people to start wondering just how valuable that offering was, and to compare it against competing applications. Also, a lot of developers I've spoken to just don't see the point of the Docker Desktop on Mac; they just want something that sits in the background and works without bugging them to update every other week.
Podman fits the use cases people have, it's open source and has more useful features than Docker Desktop currently has.
You're correct in that this sounds petty and silly, but there's history and context to this widespread move to ditch Docker.
Docker Inc wants to monetize on the basic stuff (e.g. a dumb desktop UI)
