I definitely see both of sides of it— on the one hand, it's nice that "docker pull nginx" is always shorthand for "docker pull docker.io/_/nginx" and whether or not it is isn't dependent on some config file somewhere telling you what your primary registry is. We solved this for ourselves internally by just always using fully qualified names (containers.corp.com/foo) and not worrying too much about it.

But I can also see how this is absolutely a power grab by Docker Inc. For a company which has given away almost everything and has basically no moat in terms of technology, ecosystem, or thought-leadership, I can understand them wanting to at least retain the final say on which containers are which.

And of course, given that perspective, it's clear why a company like Red Hat would chafe against this, particularly when it's clear from the architectural differences in Podman (daemonless, rootless) that they were looking for an excuse to do it over anyway.