I've used them professionally during 0.9 times (2008.) and it was already quite useful and very stable (all advertised features worked).
17 years looks pretty good to me, Proxmox will not go away (neither product or company)
SuSE was my first Linux system and it helped a lot to spark my interest. Yast (software manager) and SaX (XFree86 configuration tool) were a Godsend for a noob like me in 199x.
It's still solid today, and I hold it in high regards, even if I moved to greener Linux pastures.
Podman beeing mostly compatible with docker was a wise choice. If you run rootless no way to break fw/network like docker can.
With podman in mind, one ought to try buildah and skopeo. Again, buildah can run Dockerfiles, but you are not constrained to the weird Dockerfile syntax.