Tbh I think the moves make sense to a certain degree. Users like apps focused on specific experiences so if a user group is big enough or growing enough it makes sense to cater to that. Podcasts were briefly looking promising so spinning them off into a separate product probably seemed like an easy way of acquiring users who only cared about podcasts. Now it's the present though and it turns out podcast momentum was a shortlived trend in terms of commercial relevance and that a completely separate app is a waste of resources. Sorry to be harsh to the podcast fans but in reality I'm amazed they even preserved them at all when there's no shortage of podcast content published to YouTube already because of its reach. If people are already cross-promoting that much anyway you may as well just merge them over.