Forgive my naïveté regarding Podman. On macOS, does this use the same virtualization approach that docker desktop uses?
Yes. Perhaps OrbStack[1] is what you're looking for. [1] https://orbstack.dev/
It's a very interesting product, it does use a VM, but seems to have some "special sauce" code to improve the speed of things. It also says it shares the kernel among multiple VMs. Very cool stuff.