Personally, I am not interested in kubernetes, just podman for single-node use case. What the kube YAML does for this use case is provide a way to declare a multi-container application.

The podman documentation pages I have found most helpful for this use case are podman-kube-generate (generate kube YAML from an already running pod), podman-kube-play (run the kube manually) and podman-systemd.unit (run the kube as a service).

Edit: I should also mention that there are pod units (which don't require the use of kube YAML) but I skipped over them because they do not support podmans auto-update feature.