I think ideally they want you to use kube XML for this use case, though I haven't because it doesn't let me associate a named volume with a set of containers. The suggestion is to use bind mounts to the host instead, which feels like an issue for container portability. Podman Compose does not have this limitation
The individual containers build alright, but running the compose with Podman-Compose failed miserably with unhelpful output - just a bunch of Python stack traces. Running it with Docker-Compose just worked.
I think that Docker-Compose is just a lot more lenient with Yaml type errors - where things should and shouldn't be surrounded in quotes. Podman-Compose just needs to be a little more forgiving, and continuing to parse the compose files if the semantics can be assumed, even if the syntax is not perfect.
docker-compose has issues of its own, but when you can use it then it works really well.