Spotify clearly has set internal goals around podcast adoption and has been pushing them on users for a while (I assume because of the extra margin of playing ads to “ad free” premium subscribers), so it makes sense they’d get some kind of a boost in the results.
Yup. Having people listen to a white noise generator as a "podcast" rather than a "playlist" certainly improves their "Look how well our podcasts are doing!" numbers.
Taylor Swift's next album will probably be released as a podcast...