iPhone Podcast idiosyncracy w/Play Next (does multiple episodes)

While using the stock Podcasts app on an iPhone:

When I "... ➡play next" an episode of some podcasts that I'm subscribed to, every available episode will go into the Playing Next queue. The number of "every available episode" seems to be controlled in the app by "... Settings > Custom > Limit Episodes" - If I don't edit that number immediately when I subscribe, before I queue an episode into Play Next, it's possible that dozens of episodes will appear at the top of the queue.

This seems to be arbitrary behavior, but I suspect it's under the control of the podcast publisher.

It also seems to happen at other times but not regularly enough to document.

Any thoughts on the subject? Any hints on preventing it?

FWIW: The occurrence that triggered this Discussions Community post was the first occurrence in at least a month (so it's tolerable,) and it happened soon after the iOS-14 update (but not immediately.)

iPhone 7+ iOS 14.0

(Details for the interested geeks: Updated for ~10 days as of this writing, trigger occurrence ~12 hours ago, many podcasts queued in the days prior, no new subscriptions, this event occurred in a subscribed podcast where I maintain a "5 episodes" limit and all 5 episodes became queued at once after selecting a specific one. One last thing, a day or two earlier I'd queued another episode of the podcast and hadn't listened to it. After this "all queued" behavior there were two instances of the episode, one where I'd originally queued it and the one with all the rest of the newly queued set. Makes sense, just sayin'.)