If Google reader had never existed, I feel like RSS could have become the foundation of the modern web.
I'm talking about for the consumer. Sure, the Internet sure had a leg up on winning, in retrospect, because it was open and built by schools too. But imagine if Microsoft had successfully pushed MSN as "the" network for high schools?
These competitors were point-and-click easy for nontechies long before the Internet was.
I tried many times to use rss but found the ecosystem to be terrible.
Think a Gmail type interface, but for RRS with a built in RSS search.
Then one day, Google just killed it, and over night millions of RSS feeds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
For example: our country's version of eBay used to have a great RSS service where you could set up a feed for search queries on their site. I would skim through all the feeds once a day to see if there where any deals I liked. But now they have replaced it with an email service, which requires me to visit their website to see the results of the queries (every query also has it's own notification email). Which means they get data on the things I am potentially buying and how engaged I'm with them (since the email is coupled to my account, the RSS was not). It would also give them an opportunity to present some ads, because I have to visit their site every time I want to see if there are any interesting results.
If you are in the apple ecosystem, I would recommend giving it a try with NetNewsWire + A feedbin subscription.
NetNewsWire has an iOS and a macOS client and has a clean UI. FeedBin's killer feature is that they provide an email address that you can use to subscribe to newsletters - being able to read these along with other blog updates is a game changer.
I have found that the best content is from people who write their own newsletters or blog on their own platform. After experiencing the internet liberated from all pop ups, pay walls, advertisements, GDPR harassment and google AMP, I don't think I can ever go back.