As k8s/podman use various local networking stacks, in both rootful and rootless modes that do have a performance cost, sometimes it is valuable to use unix sockets between pod members.
To demonstrate this concept you can run the follwing with podman, with pasta or slirp4netns there is typically around a 10% loss on pgbench benchmarks for using localhost, which can be regained using sockets.
This also allows you to run containers like a db server or webapp server with their own network namespace with no internet connection, as unix sockets do not depend on a shared net or ipc namespace.
Create Pod: