The title is misleading.
People who captured the feedreader market, killed the competitors then dropped it did a lot of damage. Maybe deliberately. LESSON: Never trust a big company that relies on advertising.
RSS is a way to escape the nonsense that has come with those, who have no idea what the web can be, but have flooded in and drowned so much in their ignorance and lack of vision.
Still...
Google Reader did more to destroy my perception of Google's reputation than everything else evil they've ever done. Conspiracy to suppress wages for tech workers, James Damore, the Snowden revelations - all of those bugged me, but not like Reader.
They killed Reader, I suspect to support Plus, just as the walled gardens of the social networks turned into iron curtains, destroying the only viable alternative decentralized content distribution mechanism. And now we get to live in that world.
Reader's shutdown, after monopolizing neAly RSS tech and in order to push their own flavor of the year (Plus), was a classic tech evil
The other evil that Google is perpetrating is AMP. Reader followed an "embrace and extinguish." AMP is a full on "embrace, extend, and extinguish."
That's the closest I've found to the cleanliness and speed of Google Reader, with additional features
Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else."
However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever).
Explicit use of RSS through RSS readers was always primarily the province of journalists, analysts, researchers, and various other folks who wanted relatively unfiltered from-the-source on specific topics.
It also didn't help that individual blog content has tended to migrate to publishing platforms in general. I still write a lot but publish on my "personal" blog relatively seldom these days because visibility is so much higher elsewhere.
Google Reader nailed the social experience around RSS, and there definitely was a high point where RSS feeds were used by a lot of people on Google Reader that didn't understand and didn't need to understand RSS feeds to take advantage of them. It was just that weird news app "next" to Gmail on their browser tabs.
At least that was my anecdotal observation. A lot of college friends that I tried to convince to use RSS for ages before suddenly used RSS because it was already lit up on their Gmail account and they were seeing the stuff I was sharing at the very least.
All: let's focus on something other than the title now—it's a pretty interesting piece for anyone who doesn't know the history (as I didn't).
Let me rephrase that. Never trust people more powerful than you to consider your situation.
That is basically also a core principle of the distributed building blocks of the internet. It's just that to the masses and to the power hungry these options are not attractive.