I have been ignoring the “all episodes” list. Your comment made me consider it. It would actually solve this issue if it had a filter to show/hide episodes with the “New” flag.
This is because among those podcasts I follow in real time - it is mostly interviews, journalistic pieces, commentary of present events, weekly/daily rubrics - there will be some episodes I will not be interested in listening for some reason or another at that time. If I believe I will never be interested to ear that particular episode, I sometimes just mark them as played, and they disappear forever from my sight. Otherwise, I prefer to just remove the “New” flag and send them to the back catalog kind of.
But since the “All list” does not filter by that tag, I still see them there. So I’m back to using the “New episodes” list.
Still, automation of the flag could be complementary to this, I believe.