If you have caddy as a reverse proxy inside podman user namespace separated networks, they don’t take the upstream client IP address and instead you get local IP addresses assigned to logs. Socket activation is kinda required if you want to get the client’s real IP address in your logs.
Authentik supports more authentication types and I think it’s more stable so you can use it in larger production servers. VoidAuth seems to be a lightweight alternative that only provides OIDC.