My vote is Podman with an immutable distro, like OpenSUSE MicroOS or Fedora Silverblue. Here are my reasons:

• rolling base, with very minimal footprint, so you don’t need to worry about upgrades
• podman runs proper rootless containers, so you get better security vs docker, which tends to run as root (breaking out does less damage if you manage permissions properly)
• deploying a new service (or moving a service) just means copying configs and running, no concerns about what the host has
• there’s nothing special about the host, so if MicroOS or Silverblue are abandoned, just copy the configs and data to a new host

It’s a little more work to set up, but once things are running, it’s drama free. And I think that’s the best thing to optimize for, keeping things boring is a good thing.