Use antennapod. They literally highly discourage donations now because they have enough donations to cover their operating coats and then like 50% extra on top.

Because updating a podcast app is literally not a full time job if it is so stable as these two apps. They both release small feature updates and bug fixes for a while. Antennapod even did a full UI update to the new material standard.

Pocketcasts devs seem to want maximum profit from it. They probably have an order of magnitude more income already than antennapod due to how many more people use it and how they push subscriptions. I just don't understand why they need that much money.