I’d suggest Podman over docker if someone is starting fresh. I like Podman running as rootless, but moving an existing docker to Podman was a pain. Since the initial docker setup was also a pain, I’d rather have only done it once :/
For me the use case of K8s only makes sense with large use cases (in terms of volume of traffic and users). Docker / Podman is sufficient to self-host something small.
Use a secret manager?
Cert is a secret, add a small agent to your containers that pings your secret manager and gets back the current cert. Then saves / imports it (or whatever is appropriate).