I'm new to the container world. Does it have any security benefits when I run my applications as a non-root user in a docker container? And how about Podman? There I'll run the container as an unprivileged user anyway. Would changing the user in the container achieve anything?
This comment shows misunderstanding of what container and virtual machines are and how the technology behind each concept works. Containers are NOT virtual machines, do not treat them as such.
You're right, containers are not VMs, and I've never claimed that. For the matter of basic unix access control for a beginner they are similar enough to treat them as such. It's enough of a baseline for basic security for a beginners workload imo. For advanced use cases - absolutely do not treat containers as you would VMs.