I love podman and use it extensively, but am less sure how useful the machine functionality will be (to me). I use KVM (with virt-manager) extensively, and I could see how treating VMs as ephemeral like containers might be nice for some workflows, but for me I want my VMs to be stateful as they are now. Anything I want container workflow for I just use containers. I don't do any Windows though, all linux. I might act…
One area this is desirable is AI agents. Often you just need to spin them up for quick ephemeral tasks, but you want more isolation than containers give you. I'm still looking for a good solution here. A cool one I've been playing with recently is https://smolmachines.com/
I can recommend microsandbox. More mature than smolmachines. I have tried both.