Interesting... My experience has been pretty much exactly the opposite, Docker just works flawlessly and it's the alternatives like podman and systemd that's caused me headaches and countless hours of wasted time.
I gave podman weeks of effort trying to get its “killer feature” to work properly (rootless containers). I couldn’t even justify the time for a hobby project. Instead, I just installed Docker and went on my way.
IMO they need to improve documentation and drop the facade that it’s 1:1 Docker.
Yep, I also spent a huge amount of time trying to get podman rootless containers working. It felt like what fusion progresses looks like, forever “just around the corner”, so I also decided to just stick with docker.
I did hit some kind of networking bug on a Linux server recently (in the past 2 weeks) which required a restart of the Docker daemon, and that is my classic personal experience. We went all-in on Docker Swarm several years ago, and we ended up having to do full server reboots on what seemed like a weekly basis. And I know I'm not alone in having loads of problems on MacOS - although I must admit it seems to have been a lot better recently.