My favourite podcasts all started as passion projects, often with a simple headset next to a laptop and no production to speak of. Some keep continuing like that (although typically people get a bit deeper into audio production as time passes) and some go "professional" after a while.

The tendency to start out with a studio and crew from the get-go is always a red flag for me, and is indeed quite boring most of the time. What I want is just "two dudes talking" (or dudettes, that's fine too!) about something they're intensely, deeply interested in. Can be sociology, food, coding, whatever. It seems that's hard to set up for a commercial entity, who'd have thought?