Every website I am interested in updates from provides a feed.
Apparently YouTube content creators receive more money if they have more subscribers, but I don't subscribe and simply use the RSS feed; it's easier.
Perhaps YouTube also factors in the number of RSS requæsts they receive.
The reason for these removals is also never given. If you look at those sites now, you'd feel RSS support never existed and nobody used them. So the reason for removal could be anyone's guess. Perhaps RSS icon didn't look good with other social media icons on home page, server serving the RSS feed shut down and no one bothered to check, forgot to add RSS option in new design/refactor or some PM didn't find RSS feed engaging enough and actively killed it.
If web browsers didn't stop supporting RSS, that icon would not be needed in the first place. We used to have a standard HTML header to advertise the presence of RSS feeds, and the RSS icon was displayed by the browser, next to the URL bar, always at the same place, accessible by everyone including Grandma™.
If everyone used rss feeds new creators would never get paid.
But how many of them are actually using their feed? You reminded me that I signed up for a Feedly account years ago right after Google shut down their RSS product. I just checked and indeed I am subscribed to Ars, among a dozen other feeds.
I built my personal blog on a static site generator (Gridsome) and had to add RSS to my site intentionally. Luckily there is a plugin that provides this functionality easily now, but you still have to know about RSS, decide to offer it, and then install the plugin and configure it to compile your RSS feed with each site build. So it is something the developer or maintainer of the site has to think about (at least initially, now that it is configured it updates automatically).
I am not a huge fan of Wordpress, but I am grateful that they continue to offer it "automatically" for all Wordpress sites. This means that I am able to subscribe in my feed reader for small sites that might not even think about RSS.
I have no doubt that it's the only reason most feeds exist.
Any RSS reader really needs to be able to crawl websites to create its own feed as only consuming websites that support RSS is a pretty weak prospect.
Most of it is from webcomics that I follow, YouTube channels, and media aggregator websites that inform me whenever a new episode is out of a television series I follow.
All of these websites surely added it themselves deliberately.
Example of what I'm talking about where I think the RSS feed isn't necessarily deliberate or perhaps it's vestigial:
- [Wordpress] https://maldita.es/ (https://maldita.es/feed/)
- [Drupal] https://vanguardia.com.mx/ (https://vanguardia.com.mx/rss.xml)
My point isn't that everyone is incompetent and doesn't even mean to host RSS feeds but rather I'd wager that early turnkey CMS were the reason we have RSS. I'm rather thankful.