i feel like podcasting has gotten generally worse in aggregate since serial
individual shows are very good but there's also just so much Aggressively Normal bullshit, and every year advertising on podcasts gets worse and more intrusive, and now companies like Spotify are really trying to enclose the commons by creating things that they call podcasts but which are exclusive to their platform (and thus aren't truly podcasts, by definition of a podcast being a rss/atom/whatever web feed)
i miss the days when the average person didn't even know what a podcast was, when it was kind of a niche thing