Docker largely entered Enterprise (regulated & security conscious markets) like utilities, us gov, banks, etc. via rhel 7 / centos 7 . A lot of people doing a lot of compliance work everywhere, from approvals to infra to audits, invested serious time, $, and social capital to make that happen. With RHEL 8, IBM / RHEL bet on podman (or, "not docker"), all the way from marketing to M&A to repositories to where developer hours go. On its own, I think that's great: tech should keep pushing, and good pressure on docker for things like rootless. But, that's not the issue here.

Where this gets problematic for a commonly "single-sourced" infrastructure technology in regulated envs is IBM/RHEL also prevented docker from making it into the RHEL 8 repos. Podman was obviously technically deficient as a critical infra replacement due to immaturity like many unimplemented compatibility APIs, yet it was marketed as compatible and instead of offering both until the community could prove it out etc, RHEL8 didn't include docker. NBD for people doing redhat at home or whatever easy environments, but if you're doing something like bringing AI to important societal problems at big world-reaching orgs, having to go outside the main repos can be a major drain on time, staff, budget, and even an existential risk. This is the kind of BigCo malfeasance we're supposed to be moving away from by promoting Linux, OSS, and containers.