Quadlet are great but running podman via systemd as a non root user worked perfectly well before quadlets and I have no idea what your parent is talking about (I'm currently in the process of converting my home services from rootless podman over systemd to quadlet)
I agree 100%, I was stuck without quadlet in previous Debian stable so I had to work with systemd generate, but quadlets are undoubtedly better, and I was looking forward to upgrade Debian just for that, and now that I did, I'm really happy to migrate. Especially custom container image management is so much smoother.
Fair, it worked, but podman generate systemd is deprecated now. I found the generated unit files pretty brittle to maintain compared to just having a declarative config that handles the lifecycle.