It seems as though episodes that have been partly watched are excluded from the count towards the number of episodes to keep. I commonly only watch part of news programs, and only keep the last or last few episodes since they’re only meaningful when very current. Currently the partially watched episodes seem to linger until I manually delete them, so episodes accumulate well beyond the configured limit.
I would like the partially watched episodes to be deleted to make space for the new episode just like the unwatched episodes. At least, I’d like to have that option.