Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes no sense to add an extra layer, and we definitively do not want to make us and our users dependent of docker project. There exist many OCI runtimes, and our container toolkit already provides a (ball parked) 90% feature overlap with them. Maintaining two stacks here is just needless extra work and asking for extra pain for us devs and our users, so no, thanks. That said, PVE is not OCI runtime compatible yet…
People stuck with Docker for a reason, even after they became user hostile. Almost every selfhosted project in existence provides a docker-compose.yml that's easy to expand and configure to immediately get started. None provide generic OCI containers to run in generic OCI runtimes. I understand sticking with compatibility at that layer from an "ideal goal" POV, but that is unlikely to see a lot of adoption precisely…
We would have required to implement runtime integration anyway, and I hardly see any benefit in not releasing that lower level integration earlier.