That smart and savvy HNers are calling a closed audio medium "podcasting" means that the only important open medium for audio and video distribution is dead. Embrace, extend, extinguish works.
Your comment proves my point, which is that smart and savvy HNers simply do not understand (and maybe don't care) about companies like Spotify and Facebook misrepresenting their proprietary audio platforms as "podcasting" in their efforts to kneecap and devalue standards-based media distribution. That makes me sad.
Apple Podcasts is a real podcast app. You can open any standard podcast feed in the app and manage it like any other podcast. When you play a podcast, it plays the media as distributed by its creator(s). And when you do, the creators get the data.
As you indirectly note, Apple is mostly responsible for the childhood and adolescent growth of podcasting as an open medium. If they do abandon real podcasting in favor of a proprietary-only, audio-only platform like the ones you're apparently rooting for, I'd guess that they'll be the last to go down.
Podcast Directory in iTunes Music Store is from... 2005
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/06/28Apple-Takes-Podcast...