I’m happy to adopt a new podcast app if it has sponsorblock natively or through a plug-in. Otherwise let me know if there’s some other way to make it work. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work as all of the segments tagged for skipping are crowdsourced which would also work for Podcasts.
Ah, I assume the audio file is being put together server side and customised to the downloaders locality. The pihole is likely obfuscating that and causing a default version to be downloaded