You choose to sign up for email updates then. WordPress doesn't do it by itself. WordPress also has RSS still.
a lot of pages that use wordpress underneath still have feed-urls; if you know the URL, you can subscribe to them, even it if's not advertised in the head.
if wordpress stops using RSS it will be really dead.
That wasn't my point. Parent said RSS was the only sane way. Wordpress aside - email notifications can also be a 'sane' way.