Sadly, user reviews in 2021 is more or less useless. People that have nothing to complain about will seldomly leave a review in the first place so the metric will by default trend towards being negative by nature.
And those leaving negative reviews tend to not be even close to fair in their review. Regardless of the situation most will default to giving 1-star. There is no nuance to be had here.
I'm no huge fan of the Podcast.app myself. I find it lacking in terms of UX-design, and the fact that there is no easy way for me to access my default playlist directly is annoying. I have to open the app, then head into my playlist named "Priority Queue" and then I can start listening. Why can't I have it go directly into "Priority Queue" from the get-go like most third-party apps? I can't customise my queue even close to as detailed as some of the third-party apps.
The bottom bar in the Podcast.app has it's own place for "Listen Now". Sadly "Listen Now" doesn't take any of my habits or my customised "Priority Queue" into consideration so utilising "Listen Now" doesn't make much sense to me when my "Priority Queue" does everything better. If I could just swap the "Listen Now" button with my "Priority Queue" it would make life so much better for me.
Perhaps my biggest issue with the Podcast.app is the lack of Smart Playback like Overcast, PocketCast, Castro etc features. They've had it available for years now. Why is it that the Podcast.app can't trim silenced part of a podcast in a smart way like other apps can?
All of this makes me rate the Podcast.app 3 out 5 stars. Even with all these shortcomings it's not even close to being 1-star. To be fair, 1-star should mean that app isn't working at all. 2-star should mean it's working but it's truly terrible to use. 3-stars is more in line with something that is working, is working decent but have so much potential for improvement.