Why is that? There is no technical reason for requiring root access. Wouldn’t it be possible to have a docker compose file or similar as usual? This breaks compatibility with any kind of enterprise environment, and solutions like podman and Kubernetes.
The nice thing about container is that they are obvious to deploy, as they are packaged in a standard format, with no need to rely on vendor-specific external tool, which is what is happening here. The developers care about making things as easy as possible for sysadmins by providing a tool to support them, but by making it mandatory it makes their task harder.
Bitnami image on DockerHub has twice the number of downloads. I wonder if that is because they are packaged properly (one container for each service, not many services bundled in a single opaque container) and can be run using a compose file.