Yes! Unfortunately it is no longer mainstream since the monetization opportunities are fewer. But a lot of tech-savvy people prefer it for many reasons:

1. You get a personalized view of what you have and have not read. 2. You can scan over a lot of posts very quickly, and pick out what you want to read. 3. You can aggregate a lot of different websites in a single place. No need to visit each website individually. 4. Increased privacy. 5. Less tracking. 6. Increased control. 7. Fewer ads.

Probably more reasons, but these are the primary reasons why I still prefer RSS.

Yes (though I personally have only ever used it as a notification mechanism: I just click through to the page, and don't read the content in the reader. In fact the RSS reader I built for myself doesn't support any other mode). I follow over 100 different feeds through this, mostly on different sites (it's mostly webcomics, some news, artists, and youtube channels). It would be basically impossible to do this with any other tech: at best my feeds would be fragmented across multiple services. Some would not be possible to integrate at all. Services like this allow some of the sites I want to follow to fit into the system.

Found this story via RSS, and once again I find myself surprised that there are nerds out there that read HN but do so through the Olde Timey expedient of going to the home page.

I'd say 95% of my content discovery comes from RSS; the few sites that don't tend to be high volume sites - like news - where I get value from visiting the home page to see how editors have prioritised stories.

Yep, heavily.

Nope! That's why someone made that service, because neither they nor anyone else needs it.