https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/29/users-despair-at-apple-podcasts-app-after-update/

In spite of redesigning its Podcasts app with iOS 14.5, long-standing bugs within the app persist, and Apple has introduced a range of new crippling usability problems, according to hundreds of reports from users across Twitter and Reddit.

Apple's iOS 14.5 update, accompanied by iPadOS 14.5 and macOS Big Sur 11.3 brought a major overhaul of the Podcasts app, including a new design, a re-thought system of "following" shows instead of "subscribing," a new centralized location to change new episode notifications, in-app paid podcast subscriptions for the first time, and more.

Apple's Podcasts app has been infamous among some podcast enthusiasts for its range of long-standing bugs and unreliability. Such bugs have included skipping playback, inaccurate timestamps, skewed UI elements, and unresponsive scrolling.

One of the most bemoaned aspects of Apple's Podcasts app has been its issues with syncing, where users have found that the app outright fails to sync episodes added to a library, individual podcast settings, and listened to episodes across devices.

Apple sometimes gets an unfairly bad rap for its cloud services—iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Drive both work well—but whatever they’re doing to sync podcast state across devices is an unmitigated disaster and has been for years. — Jim Wong (@james_d_wong) April 29, 2021

How many updates do Apple need to release for Podcasts to make the thing sync between devices? What’s the point of putting it on Apple Watch, iPad , iPhone, TV etc if none of it ever bloody syncs? How is it everyone can seem to add sync to stuff like this apart from Apple?! — Andy (@AndyNicolaides) April 15, 2021

Such problems have supported the rise of some third-party podcast apps such as Overcast, Pocketcasts, and other apps that do not have so many debilitating bugs.

Some users hoped that the overhaul of Podcasts in iOS 14.5 would put an end to these long-suffered problems, but the updated app seems to have included a range of crippling new issues for some users, in addition to the previous problems that have not been resolved.

After the iOS 14.5 update, the Apple Podcasts app is now an active obstacle to listening to podcasts. 🤦‍♂️ — Velma Dinkley (@marlapropism) April 28, 2021

The new iOS 14.5 Podcasts app is a serious regression. They’ve removed most of the features to bring it down to par with the awful Spotify player. — Ryan Poole (@rmp135) April 27, 2021

The biggest problem seems to be related to Apple's re-thought system of following Podcasts, which has replaced subscribing and adding episodes to the library.

For some users, the Podcasts app is now adding and downloading every unlistened episode of every followed podcast to users' libraries, in some cases stretching back years and many hundreds of episodes.

Some users are reporting that having hundreds of old episodes added to their device is also using massive amounts of mobile data.

The only way to practically use the app for affected users is to manually mark every unplayed episode of every podcast a user subscribes to as played, one by one. Worse still, users will have to continue marking every episode of a podcast that they do not want to listen to as played in order to remove it from view.

Since you can no longer add an individual podcast to your library, you can also no longer remove a podcast from your library, leaving countless episodes in users' lists with no way of removing them from view except marking them as played and toggling "Hide Played Episodes" on in Settings.

It is not yet clear if this is intended behavior, at least in part. Apple has fundamentally changed the way in which podcasts exist within a library in iOS 14.5. There is no longer a library that users can add episodes to. This means that the "library" side of podcasts that users now see is effectively the direct view of feeds, with all episodes on display, rather than what they have chosen to add or remove themselves.