Rust or C would be lower level languages that integrate well with Python. Or, could go into something weird like Erlang or Elixir.

Accurate.

Podman is just as easy to install--admittedly they give way more support for Ubuntu and Fedora than other platforms (unfortunately). But once you've switched, you won't go back; it really is a 'seemless' transition, and you can use the same dockerfiles and docker-compose files with it.

Podman is great and now is compatible with the docker engine. Having rootless containers by default is awesome! There's also a utility called podman-compose that I also highly recommend.