There's a perfectly legit reason for wanting a stable, non-rolling, OS while keeping some software updated beyond versions the OS provides.
Lots of other software providers seem to care about being compatible with LTS releases of popular distros, like...Docker! They seem to manage supporting the older kernel and systemd versions just fine.
And, my entire argument here, is that this difference between Podman and Docker is glaring and one of the reasons Podman isn't more popular.