Would some of them be useful for fast forward upgrades in the future
though? I suppose it all depends on where you draw your "upgrade lines"
from major version to major version.

Many of these steps are very similar. It seems like it would be
possible to detect podman in the systemd unit file (systemctl show
<service> | grep podman) or something and then set your Ansible
variables accordingly to disable the block if podman is being used.

And improvement might be to put this logic into a playbook and consume
it from each module. That is, if we even want to keep this upgrade code
for the future.