Ive actually been personally moving away from kubernetes for this kind of deployment and I am a big fan of using ansible to deploy containers using podman systemd units, you have a series of systemd .container files like the one below

[Unit]
Description=Loki

[Container]
Image=docker.io/grafana/loki:3.4.1

# Use volume and network defined below
Volume=/mnt/loki-config:/mnt/config
Volume=loki-tmp:/tmp/loki
PublishPort=3100:3100
AutoUpdate=registry

[Service]
Restart=always
TimeoutStartSec=900

[Install]
# Start by default on boot
WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

You use ansible to write these into your /etc/containers/systemd/ folder. Example the file above gets written as /etc/containers/systemd/loki.container.

Your ansible script will then call systemctl daemon-reload and then you can systemctl start loki to finish the example

I think the gap you have is in understanding that Podman Compose was meant to line up with the limitations of docker’s compose, but technically is more capable.

Quadlet files let you do more complex workflows like deploying multiple copies of a service in your deployment that regular compose doesn’t, while not running full kube.

The use I have is that I have something deployed in compose right now that I’d like to scale up on the box since i have the capacity for it, but dont want to deal with a full kube setup or the politic

Personally I’ve converted most of my single node k3s to using quadlet files instead as its less fragile. I absolutely deploy single containers in the quadlet. They show up in journalctl and the ergonomics are great.