Heh. I used uBlock origin to hide all the podcast elements in Spotify web for a clean desktop web-based Spotify. Every time I open up the app on my phone, I die a little.
Spotify was pretty snappy in the early days, I guess a decade ago now. Current iteration boots up in 3 minutes and is unnavigable. Went back to Winamp and occasional usage of the web player.
I largely believe the Spotify folks keep making changes in their apps solely to break the experiences of those who're running cracked (ad-blocked) builds.
They seem to be happy breaking everyone else’s experience too though. Even basic functionality fails quite often for me.
The absolute worst is the macOS Music app, which doesn’t seem to allow basic things such as dragging from search results to playlists.