There are podcasts that try to edit down long conversations but they tend to cut the tangential and inadvertently revealing good stuff to deliver main points. If you just want main points you should just read an article.
"Just listen to it in the background" isn't really workable for everybody. I barely listened to my own podcast episode. Text is just better for some people, which happen to be a majority on HN.
It's better for HN too. Note that we can't get any interesting comments until submission plus two hours, since it's two hours long.
Besides that, yes, I love to read articles, too. I do a lot of transcription skimming of episodes where the voices and cadence don’t add much but the information is solid.
YouTube auto-transcripts are usually fairly readable or at least skimmable for the interesting time stamps. There are sites and services (like Readwise) that display them side by side with the video.
I don’t think HN benefits from people quickly skimming article text to add comments, unless they are primary sources themselves and can quickly address a misunderstanding, but that’s another discussion…
In the spirit of the podcast, I asked GPT-4 for help in writing a reply, and it did a pretty okay job. https://imgur.com/a/MBQoq4A