A basis state would be one of the fundamental states a quantum thing can be in. A classical computing bit has states of 1 and 0 that are analagous to |1> and |0> basis states in a quantum state. A quantum bit would be in a mxture of both.
Without looking at the details, this work probably still uses something like that, under the hood. In mainline sbcl, dumping an executable with save-lisp-and-die will create an executable that depends on a few dynamic libraries and, if you use the ffi, whatever dynamic libraries you're using though that. With the already existing static-program-op in one of the cffi packages (grovel, maybe?), you can get an executable with all of the libraries linked through the cffi linked in staticly (you won't need those .so files when you distribute the executable) but it will still need a few dynamic libraries when run. Glibc and libm at least, I think.
As I understand it, this work is attempting to remove even those last few dynamic dependencies so you can distribute the dumped executable and be done.
So, better if you want simpler distribution at the cost of larger executables.
Generally, it's been pretty easy to transition for me, but I used to rely on things like the automatic nginx image that you need to mount the docker socket into so it can route traffic to containers when they come up. Since there's no daemon, there wasn't a way to do that. I think people are working on it, but I haven't tried recently.
Work also uses a special docker RUN command that can use the host's ssh keyring to, eg. Install something from a private github repo. Doesn't seem to exist in podman.
The second author on the piece, Dorothy Gambrell, also publishes interesting data at Very Small Array (http://www.verysmallarray.com/) and has been writing the webcomic Cat and Girl (http://catandgirl.com/) pretty much forever! She's real neat.