Yeah the preference is yours, at the end of the day, I don’t think it matters what tools you use as long as it works.
Worth noting is that a process not managed by pid 1 isn’t really a thing you want generally. If you use systemd to start the docker daemon, which then starts your container, its still managed by pid 1 eventually. Perhaps you prefer the tooling and interface of docker more than machinectl, or maybe podman just isnt working for you, they’re all just tools to interact with kernel namespaces and cgroups. For doing a little dabbling in another distro, installing docker is pretty heavy vs what the article is talking about.