The biggest problem with the `systemctl daemon-reload (--user)` workflow to register quadlets with systemd is it hides any generation errors in journald instead of giving immediate feedback. It's a real pain in the ass, and I say this from a place of love.

Quadlets are just a systemd generator: all `daemon-reload` is doing is running `podman-system-generator` which looks at the Quadlet files and turns them into systemd unit files with a big honking `podman run --rm --blah container:tag` as the `ExecStart` property. There's nothing else to it, no daemons or what not

If you ever feel like bothering to give it another shot check journalctl to see if there's any generator errors. Or run the generator directly: on my OpenSUSE box it's at `/usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/podman-system-generator` , Run it with `--dry-run` to just output to stdout and `--user` to get user quadlets.