Earlier quoted context omitted.
ideally a coop of some variety This is the role I feel like podman, the tool developed by Red Hat, is filling.
Podman is great and is first class citizen on Fedora. It also integrates nicely with SystemD. My only gripe with it is not many developers provide podman configuration on their install pages like they do with docker compose
(There have been a few false starts so I'm specifically referring to the vanilla unmodified docker-compose that makes Docker API calls to a UNIX socket which Podman can listen to).