For me, RSS is by far (still) the best way to access web content.
I've tried some self hosted RSS readers over the years but I've stayed with FreshRSS[1] for the last year. It has been a marvelous experience. Zero trouble, zero administrative burden. Self-hosted bliss. Best of all is the fact that it uses a flat file DB so it can easily be backed up, moved around and migrated. Can not recommend it enough. Also, it's PHP, so works on any cheap shared hosting. That's how I use it.
One of the best things about it is escaping the algorithmically curated feeds.
Every site and service that I wish to follow has an RSS feed, except for Twitter. I use RSS-Bridge[2] (self hosted too) to follow users. RSS-Bridge[2] will give you feeds for just about every service you can think of.
If you don't find a feed for a site, sometimes you just have to dig a little. You learn at which URIs the most commons CMSes presents their Atom/RSS feeds (hello /feed/).
Same for me. I'm using Feedly atm. But the majority of users don't use RSS and they never did. Perhaps that is never going change.
I think RSS just suffers from inflated expectations, a lot of technologists like Winer thought it was going to somehow trump the realities of the content industry (like content providers restricting licensing and distribution when it makes them more money). A protocol isn't a complete business, or app, or even user experience. It's just a piece you can combine with other pieces, and many people do.
It's not even that big of a deal that some sites like Facebook are walled off from RSS. We should keep it around and use it for everything else, which still means tons of content. So what if you can't see your Facebook timeline in your RSS reader, FB is mostly junk content anyway.
Here's a problem that needs some real attention: RSS syndicates articles and posts (or at least their excerpts), but we never got a good and widely adopted standard for syndicating comments, reactions, and identity. What would the Web look like today if we'd had a good standard for that stuff when Zuckerberg was building Facebook? ActivityPub's meant to address these areas, but it's a lot more complicated than RSS, and a big part of why RSS succeeded was because it was simple. It remains to be seen whether AP will take off -- maybe they need a simplified version 2.0.
You should take a look at https://indieweb.org . Work's being done there for quite some time about adopting web standards to make the open web social and moving away from data silos.
This is just clickbait, plain and simple. It's fashionable these days to declare X or Y is dead/dying to bring more views in. It's tabloid media gone digital, nothing more.
In the past year I have cleaned my mess of (social media) accounts and got rid of everything that is not needed and switched over to RSS (with Liferea). It works perfectly fine. No annoying notifications, no unnecessary mails, just new News when I feel like opening my RSS feed. A wonderful thing.