Always nice to see someone demystifying a complex thing by learning the building blocks it's made from.

Knowing this, you might find rootless Podman's fork-exec method of starting containers to be more sensible. I certainly do. No root, no daemon, no socket.

If you want to learn more about the Linux Kernel namespaces which work together to make a container, this LWN series is really good: https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/