after longest break, I went back to that misbehaving system - in case I never replied, to share a "fix"
-> $ podman system reset -f
WARN[0000] RunRoot is pointing to a path (/run/user/2001/containers) which is not writable. Most likely podman will fail.
Error: default OCI runtime "crun" not found: invalid argumen
-> rm -f ~/.local/share/containers/storage/db.sql
-> $ podman system reset -f
-> echo $?
-> 0