In my experience podman compose is not a sufficient replacement.
Docker compose can be used with podman via the podman socket daemon. It’s very easy to get working. Give it a try.
It improved a lot and has a new maintainer, your problems might be solved by now.
I’ll have to give it another try.
I should clarify that the issues I had were podman compose being able to run unaltered compose files that worked with docker compose, many of which were fairly complicated. It may have been adequate for simpler use cases back when I tried it.