your app choices are pretty terrible for playing podcasts on Windows. You could do it through YouTube, download the audio to your local drive and play through an app like Foobar 2000.

I agree and disagree. You could perhaps use ReadFeeds by @norrumar but at times that can either seem somewhat difficult or perhaps it conflicts with gestures even though those can be reassigned.
https://github.com/nvdaes/readFeeds/releases/download/26.0.2/readFeeds-26.0.2.nvda-addon

I tried using it and didn't like the interaction much.But, different people have different tastes and may have different results. It's worth trying as an option.

@ppatel @ChrisDuffley Sorry for the late reply. In addition to gestures, readFeeds has a dialog with buttons to use different options. I will release a stable version before 2024 . 1. I"m not very active in Mastodon, but please let me know if you find any issoes