In the OpenShift world we use CRI-O and it has been awesome for us. I've never actually had it be a problem. Occasionally have to SSH into a node and inspect with crictl to see what's going on but it's almost always PEBKAC that points at CRI-O when it's not CRI-O's fault. I'd definitely recommend looking at it.
Only docker, buildkit, podman, buildah, and some non-Dockerfile based tools are able to build. CRI-O or containerd do not have build functionality. It does have pretty much everything else you expect like pull, ps, run exec, attach, rm, rmi, etc.
If you need builds, I'd suggest either run dockerd alongside a containerd kubelet, or use buildkit.
