I live in a bike friendly area of a big German city with good public transit — all of which doesn't matter because the nearest grocery store is less than 50m away from where I'm currently sitting in the apartment...
You're not unreasonable, having good access to basic goods and services is one of the main factors for general quality of life.
Ideally, find a job for your husband in an American/international company with an office in Germany or allows working remotely all the time. Ideally you'd find such a job before even moving here. This is the only realistic perspective I know of to get a higher paying job without being pretty much fluent in German (which is hard).
I have seen this work with North and South Americans.
For your personal use, you probably shouldn't get an "AI" GPU. If you start needing a terrabyte of VRAM and heat, space, and energy start getting real problems, reconsider. Even if you need more VRAM than the best gaming GPU (i.e. 5090...), it will be cheaper to get multiple gaming GPUs and use them as a cluster (you will take a performance hit though).
Your distrust is kind of reasonable: I've been using this a lot for the past year and there definitely were two or three moments where it was a bit annoying, too little transparent on what commands will be run, etc.
One thing the author probably hasn't done yet or just doesn't mention is that you can configure .container services with systemd-podman units (often called quadlets), e.g. a simple MariaDB container would look like this:
This is superb, because it means your containers finally feel well-integrated with the rest of the OS and you can use systemctl, journalctl, etc. just like you would with other services.
Personally, I use this as an alternative to Podman/Docker compose and have been very happy with it running rootless containers from Nextcloud, Pufferpanel, Forgejo, Authentik, etc. (ask me for .container files if you need any help, I'm currently working on a small repo with a collection)
✨Python 3.13✨