I understand why Google would shut down an expensive gambit like Stadia, but cheap good-will projects like RSS and Podcasts? Why not just keep them running for PR alone? How expensive could they possibly be to run?
That said, I somehow doubt that many people are going to transition from Podcasts to YouTube Music. There are too many alternatives out there, alternatives that would likely reflect the interests of Podcasts users better. Heck, nearly three quarters of podcast consumers are already using those products.
Besides both using audio files, Podcasts and Music are totally different markets, with different use cases, etc. Are spreadsheets and games in similar markets, because they both use graphics on video screens?
Jamming them together because of some superficial similarity is a stupid simplification, even if many users already do things sub-optimally.
Google really needs to get some cheap offshore teams that can do maintenance on the products they'd otherwise kill. They'd stop burning so much goodwill that way.
Slightly more realistic examples would be "spreadsheets and databases" or "spreadsheets and word processors". Plenty of people use a spreadsheet when data is represented in a tabular format, even when it isn't the most appropriate tool. (Tangentially, I've also heard of 4x games referred to as spreadsheet games. Though that's more of a description of play style than presentation!)
Don't get me wrong. I agree that podcasts shouldn't be jammed in with music. At least for myself. Yet when Google's numbers are saying that about a quarter of people access podcasts through YouTube, there are clearly a lot of people who do not agree!
Now for Podcasts (or any given product) there's always going to be some calculus of "is it enough value to justify the cost", and clearly Google believes the answer here is no.
Of course, the only thing that's really in danger is the careers (and egos) of those managers. Internal competition would be an extremely good source of information on the performance of the business those managers manage.
So anything remotely competitive gets eliminated.
Maybe you could spin up a lower tier of engineers who aren't on the same career track and exist only to maintain mature/deprecated products, but that could come with its own set of problems.