The irony really does make the case better than the article itself. I've been using Articyl for a while, RSS feeds, saved articles, and podcasts all in one place. The saved article reader strips everything back to just the content, so no 37MB surprises. It can also send your reading list to a Kindle as PDF/EPUB over email if you want to get away from screens entirely.
I've gated narrations at the minute outside of trials as each narration costs me money to create, but currently I have the functionality to use the mobile devices sharing feature to bring sites into the app, from there you can request narrations on individual articles.
Interesting point on audio books though, I might look into creating a single narration for batches of articles in the same way I currently do for PDF/EPUB.