As mentioned Podman 1.0 should not require sudo. But another advantage of Podman is that even when it does use sudo, there is traceability back to to user who invoked it (by checking the loginuid). This works because Podman forks a user process to execute instead of making a call to the Docker daemon which then executes (and uses the init loginuid).
Right there are many reasons to run podman as "real" root as well. Using containers within systemd unit files, is one use case. Setting up a docker daemon to run a single container at boot is way overkill. If you just use podman within a unit file to start/stop containers, it works really well, and does not sit around using up memory and allowing others to communicate with it.
See this article for more details https://opensource.com/article/18/10/podman-more-secure-way-...