I think calling it an emulation downplays podman. Docker and podman are both container runtimes. Docker came first and is known synonymously with containers, whereas podman is newer and attempts to fix docker’s problems.
One outcome of this is podman chose to match docker’s cli very closely so nobody needs to learn a new cli. You can even put podman on the docker socket so “docker [command]” runs with podman.
Which languages with a full runtime and memory management are in the same ballpark? Go, maybe? Obviously these are unimpressive figures for unmanaged languages.