Feeds are great, but they should be ones that you can curate yourself (RSS/Atom). Otherwise you get sucked into a void of others' intentional manipulation of your attention.
RSS is very much not dead, although it's probably gotten less popular since the death of Google Reader.
So the first lesson is that there are very different usage styles in consuming RSS feeds. Some focus on text, others on images, others on podcasts, and still others on video. Some like to get hundreds of items every day and manage them in folders, while others prefer only few items but look at all of them. Some consume stuff right away, others use "read later" functionality.
The second lesson is that apparently Google Reader supported all those styles reasonably well. It was good enough that no serious competition emerged. I would assume that this would be different today. Due to the flourishing wealth of feed readers, every style has probably found one that works even better than Google Reader did.
It took a while (one or two years?) but now Google shutting down Reader has turned out to be positive. Some considered it the death of RSS, but it works just as well as back then.
It even has a web version with the same features for desktop use. It's a small enough service that it hasn't attracted the negative attention of publishers.