Wishful thinking, mostly. But Spotify seems like the most likely path to non-ad-based monetization of the “bottom 90%” of podcasts, despite the fact that Spotify isn’t currently going down that path.

I'd pay a higher subscription price if Spotify could get me my podcasts without ads.

Most podcasts do ad reads in the show, and that's usually how they make their money.

And which is not something Spotify will change. Did you read the article? It goes into detail about that, the only thing that would probably change here is that the ads won't be read by podcasters anymore but inserted by Spotify ad-tech. They can't pay podcasters without getting a lot more money than they get from current subscriptions, they are still loosing money on their music subscription service. That's the entire point of their podcast pivot. Make more money. They have no money to hand out to podcasters. Podcasts won't be ad-free on Spotify, no matter if you're paying or not.