A good option for power users, probably a bit overwhelming if you just want something simple, but for someone like me that wants to do stuff like different default playback speeds for different podcasts, it's really good.
I wish there was an open source backend service for syncing. Since the clients are open source, should be technically possible to replicate the functionality of the cloud service. But maybe that's harder than just creating from scratch? Too bad though because pocket casts is definitely one of the best android clients around.
Google Podcasts is still around until next year, and the Youtube Music app will have that functionality added this year. It's all in the first paragraph.
They said the same thing with Google Play Music, and never added the same functionality to YT music, which is massively inferior for everything besides discovering new music
PocketCasts is open source and is decent. It was bought by Automattic (who also own and develop WordPress), so should be a reasonably safe bet going forward.
[1] https://antennapod.org/
[2] https://gpodder.net/