Yah. I'm baffled by this. Absolutely baffled. You set up a site, any site, make an RSS feed, and we all had aggregators that polled and downloaded new episodes. This system was working fantastically. Why is this even happening?!
Are you thinking along the lines of people who make the podcast their full time jobs? Do you think the likelyhood of accomplishing this will be easier or harder for a given aspiring podcaster once a middleman controls their revenue, ability to distribute, and context of listening?
And honestly, I don't know the answer to that, all I know that is my experience is going to end up massively worse if authors keep choosing centralization.
> once a middleman controls their revenue, ability to distribute
Patreon already is their middleman that controls their revenue and ability to distribute premium content.