VPN + DDNS is what I do. You may be thinking about the perf hit of putting all your home connections through a VPN. That's not the idea here. For self hosted services you would set up a wireguard "server" at your house. Then you connect your phone back to it to access your services.

With Wireguard it's pretty easy to do a split tunnel, so that the VPN connection is only used for traffic to your home servers. Nothing else is affected, and you have access to your house all the time.

This is better for security than DDNS + open ports, because you only need a single open UDP port. Port scanners won't see that you are hosting services and you wouldn't need to build mitigations for service-specific attacks.

As far as podman, I am migrating to it from a mix of native and docker services. I agree with others that getting things set up with Docker first will be easier. But having podman as an end goal is good. Daemonless and rootless are big benefits. As are being able to manage it as systemd units via quadlets.