I understand that to admins or experienced users service files probably feel like home. To an inexperienced user like me it added quite a lot of friction, especially compared to docker where I pretty much copy the compose file and run it.

I tried to use podman instead of docker, but decided that for my home use it might not be worth the headache, but I might reconsider now that I could use LLM to set those up for me.

Definitely, but then it feels like it comes with a cost rather than benefit of not having a daemon. You gain more control at the cost of convenience.

It doesn’t and I’m sure there are benefits, but for basic home services daemonless translated directly into more work for no benefit.