The change from Google Podcasts to YouTube Music is horrible

Why did they change this?

Google Podcasts was lean and mean and just the way I liked it. I had my subscriptions and had no need to go through 15 layers just to download and listen to a podcast. And it was easy to "explore" other Podcasts and come across something interesting in my explore feed (my only gripe was that I couldn't get shit like Shapiro or other right wing grifters out of my Explore feed).

Now on YouTube Music, it's a bloated home screen full of extraneous shit. It defaults to the podcast video unless otherwise specified. I've downloaded the audio versions, but since i have my settings set to only "stream" when connected to WiFi, it seems like they only actually download a small percentage of the time. There have been multiple times where I download a podcast, see the checkmark verifying that, and then when I step outside it kicks out.

I'm sure there are easy enough solutions to this, maybe, but I legitimately hate the changeover. It sucks.

Simple isn't a bad thing.

Edit: Appreciate all the suggestions and will take a look into them. Also glad to hear I'm not the only one baffled by this stupidity. But even with these other options - the reason I went with the Pixel is because I liked the simplicity. I liked not having to depend on various outside apps or bloat to take advantage of my phone.

Edit 2: A month later, but I'm still getting responses so I figured I'd mention - I've been using Pocketcasts and so far, so good. Not quite as seamless as Google Podcasts, but much better than YT Music.