Podcasts are still short form if we're talking about something as complex as "is this company ethical". Issues involving human players and disagreements over philosophy/ethics take a huge amount of information to understand at anything beyond a vibes level.
You can understand almost any controversial issue better than almost everyone commenting on it by reading 1-3 books on the subject. It's becoming more of an x-factor as people get conditioned to expect everything to fit in a headline, chat response, or 10 second social media video.
Podcasts (and video) are very low-throughput, low-density information channels. Essays and articles are superior. To demonstrate this, you can just compare the transcript of a typical podcast — even a high-quality, well-researched one — with a typical high-quality, well-researched blog post, essay, or journalistic article.
Sure, but the other angle is time investment. I only listen to podcasts sporadically but I can definitely see why people like it. Not as a substitute to reading but _in addition_ to reading. Listening to a podcast can be done while driving, or cooking, etc. It beats sitting in traffic and just listening to music (to some people).
It's odd that people don't understand this. It's not about Tiktok brain. I would rather read a book or a dense article than listen to people meander on a Podcast and pad their time.
There's a world of difference between a tweet and a podcast, which are designed to NOT deliver information efficiently.