Unplayed Episodes of Podcasts Randomly Coming Back as Unplayed

I listen to a podcast called The Daily and as the name suggests it's a daily podcast. I have all episodes marked as played, but in the last few months episodes began randomly showing up as unplayed. It seems very consistent that for each new episode an old one shows up as unplayed.

Example: Today September 1st 2022 a new episode is available, but when I open the library I see TWO episodes unplayed, the one for today and one from September 3rd 2021. If I don't listen for a couple of days and I should have 3 new episodes I will have 6 unplayed episodes... the three I haven't actually listened to and another three from approximately a year ago that I HAVE listened to (and were not showing up as unplayed the previous day).

Super frustrating, does anyone have any suggestions? Or is anyone else seeing this?