Rootless support has been in BuildKit since 2018. I feel like all of the tools RedHat rebuilt, that didn't really offer anything new and in a lot of cases offered a whole lot less, is centric to very diehard RedHat oriented folks. If anything we should hope that all of the Docker bits stay where they are because I surely trust RedHat far less under IBMs leadership.

And, no. Podman doesn't offer any advantages in the Kubernetes ecosystem by mapping better into k8s "models".