Ugh. How do these companies so thoroughly not understand their own raison d'être?
They’ve calculated that the customers who drop because of it is outweighed by the higher profits from playing podcasts.
I contacted their support to ask how to remove these advertisements from the product I paid for, and they told me that this was impossible.
Impossible is a strong word, and installing https://github.com/spicetify proved that it was, in fact, possible to remove the ads for podcasts from their product.
It's growth, that's why they exist, searching for growth