I don’t listen to content on reduced playback speed. I usually listen on normal speed.
For the Mini Stories and other beginner content, when I became familiar with the stories (like 5x+ listens), I’d listen to them on increased speed. Whether it was 1.1x or 2x, depended on my confidence with the exact story, how slow the initial content was (beginner content is often slow), what I was doing at the same time as listening, etc.
When I get a little bit better with Italian, I’ll increase the playback speed for native content on the first time too. (I listen to English content on fast speed, so that’s my aim with Italian too.)