On regular Fedora, podman utilizes user namespaces when invoked by a non-root user, so in the end it’s possible to use podman w/o root:
$ podman images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
docker.io/library/busybox latest 8c811b4aec35 2 months ago 1.36MB
$ podman run -ti docker.io/library/busybox sh
/ # id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=65534(nogroup),65534(nogroup),65534(nogroup),65534(nogroup),65534(nogroup),65534(nogroup),65534(nogroup),0(root),65534(nogroup),65534(nogroup)
/ # exit
$ id
uid=1000(tt) gid=1000(tt)