You can tell which service depends on which in compose, you can create, specify and set networks and add containers to them, you can keep a central database and just add the network of it to your new services, and you can also specify a container name.

The point is, if I get a compose file, all of that is already wired up with expectations of the maintainer. When I start heavily modifying it, I end up with an unmaintainable mess. So I rather look into what the service(s) actually require and build it for my use case.

Besides, what is your alternative?

The CLI, yes. And for my own server Ansible. But the semantics of the ansible module are identical to the CLI. Knowing the CLI by heart gets me much further than knowing docker-compose by heart. (Actually, I would have to look into the manual for docker-compose all the time, while I can simply do podman --help to see what parameters it needs, if I forgot something.)