Updating now that I got this to work. The original BabelPod repo seems to be abandoned but another community member has sort of taken it over and addressed the issues.
Here’s the comment to follow to get it to work: Successful install, but no audio playing on Homepod · Issue #17 · afaden/babelpod · GitHub
The system does seem to expect 44100 sampling rate so the steps in the comments above are also needed.