I’m still pretty pi*sed off about my podcasts disappearing. I can only hope by the final release of Catalina these issues will be fixed. I’ll have to restore an old Mojave backup to a virtual machine, then upgrade to the final version Catalina, then surgically transfer podcasts folders from the VM to my main machine to finally fix this horrible mess. Failing that, I can only hope the next major release of macOS will have these issues fixed, but I’m doubtful; Apple left Podcasts in iTunes full of bugs for like eight years up to and including the final release. Pretty sad how Apple is now.