You're entirely right, and yet I think there's still a place for it.

It all depends on what you want to use it for. For my use case, I built a feed reader that just needs to know the titles, URLS, and publication dates of articles. That let me build an RSS/Atom reader that lets me curate my own news feeds and delegates everything else to the normal browser.

Are there inconsistencies and broken feeds? Sure a few, but for my purposes, I can ignore 99% of that. Is it wasteful? Sure, it. could be more efficient, but honestly downloading React and a hundred dependencies every time I visit a webpage is as well.

Fear not though, many sites built with tools like Gatsby aren't including RSS feeds, so your wishes may still come true.